Nanochips in newborns in the 1980’s? You really heard this, or is it another figment of your fervent imagination?
They may not have used the exact terminology “nanochip” but similar things were already well within the public mind by the 80s. Novels like Cyborg (1972), the source for the “6 Million Dollar Man” and countless other works would mean functionally similar ideas were in the minds of some at least.
Back to anti-vaxxers, some of them come into it looking to find a reason bad things happen. And when they’re hurting and weak, they fall down a hole, and THEN, the preach the New Faith bringing harm to others.
I’ve mentioned this before on this board, but I had a lover (brief) in College that I kept up on through friends of friends. She was actively rebelling against a very traditional Christian upbringing at the time, so was experimenting (note, I do not say she wasn’t heartfelt!) with free love, spirituality, free choice, and other more expansive ways to live. After college she got married, and was more of a traditional progressive Democrat who considered herself spiritual but not religious, was for environmental causes, hated guns.
And then she and her spouse had their first child. Diagnosed with autism around age two. And then she snapped.
I’m not going to speculate (even in the Pit) if she had anti-vax trends previously (it happens on both sides of the political spectrum though generally for different reasons), but after flailing around trying to find a “fix”, it seemed she found the anti-vaxx movement as a way to explain to herself why this had happened, and of course, to find someone to blame, to focus the hurt, pain and despair onto.
And a few years after that, well, most of my information is lost. She became a very vocal supporter, and the friend of friends who had been my contact cut ties with her. At that point (this is all Pre-Trump and MAHA by years of course) she was somewhere between a Libertarian (who still wanted support for those like herself that had been harmed by Big Phama/Big Medicine) and a nihilistic “everyone is corrupt, burn it all down except those of US in the know” CT’er.
So, long story short: there’s a lot of ways for people to embrace anti-vaxx philosophy, some are hurting for real, honest reasons and lashing out. I’m more tolerant of them emotionally (a personal choice TBC!) but hate the harm they do to others and do NOT forgive them that. The fact that so very many of them are conned into their beliefs in a moment of weakness by all the out-and-out cons that are selling them on their own products (clicks, books, supplements, etc.) - oh those fuckers are the ones that make me want to join the “burn them all down” types from time to time.
They may not have been called that, but yeah.
That was around the same time that a woman told me that the Federal government put microchips in money, and drove around and fired some kind of ray gun at houses to see how much money they had hidden. I didn’t believe that either.
Yes, this. With the advent of mRNA technology these nutbars got new energy: ‘IT’S MESSING WITH OUR DNA!!1!!!’ etc.
So the dumbest fucks on earth are gonna kill us.
I guess that’s the way it’s always been…
I’m currently reading a book that posits quantum tunneling may influence biology at the DNA level. I wonder how hard it would be to start a “No more quantum tunneling” campaign?
Yeah they said it was the mercury (it wasn’t) which must have been magic since the mercury seemed to still increase the autism rate even after it was removed.
RFK Jr. seized on a small fraction of flu vaccines (in multidose vials) still containing thimerosal (mercury-based preservative) to trumpet the necessity of its removal, but yes, mercury has been gone from virtually all vaccines for more than two decades.
For replacement fearmongering, antivaxers have seized on aluminum (used in some vaccines as an adjuvant to improve immune response and make it possible to use fewer antigens), but two major recent studies have made it overwhelmingly clear that aluminum in the tiny amounts used in vaccines is safe.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997
https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2025-088921
Still, there are plenty of faux toxins for antivaxers to scare parents about.
The other biggie in the antivax arsenal has been the “too many too soon” mantra, which argues that the poor kiddies’ immune systems are overwhelmed by vaccines - but antigenic stimulus from vaccines is dwarfed by the challenges children’s immune systems face every day in their environment.
Formaldehyde is a scary word, but my understanding is that the average vaccine contains about 1% as much as the average pear.
OMG you admit vaccines contain a TOXIN! A toxin that is a known human carcinogen and respiratory irritant and biocide used in industry and for embalming!
I knew vaccines were dangerous and now you totally admit it.
Sunlight alters DNA.
So, it should be easy to convince antivaxxers to crawl into a hole and never come out again.
Which also happens to be less than the amount we produce naturally as part of our metabolic processes (and very quickly metabolize)
Great Og, people are dumb
To quote Friedrich Schiller (in translation):
That is awesome.
And the mercury that was in vaccines is not the variety that gets metabolized, like that in fish, and in fact runs right through you without staying.
And of course they invented some other problem.
I’m up on this because I just proof read my wife’s expansion of her book on vaccines, which was published in 2019. Her publisher and editor asked her to update it for Covid and mRNA vaccines. (She had mentioned them but they were not as prevalent back then.) I found some wacko anti-vaxx quotes for her.
In the 1970s, I wrote a sci-fi story about a plot to do just that (but to college kids rather than babies),
Probaly the word used in those times was “microchip” and not “nanochip”
Published 12 years ago, no less!
My pacemaker has a bluetooth interface to my phone. It’s so big that it would be hard to not notice. The battery lasts a little under ten years.
The microchips they implant in pets do not have batteries. Sensing them requires a device that is closer than the device is big.
What they are talking about was science fiction at the time, and still is. We’re getting closer to possibly being able to implement that kind of miniaturization every year, but we are still very far off.
We are talking about something small enough to inject via a standard hypodermic needle. That’s basically advanced nanotechnology. Still the sort of speculative science you see in futuristic fantasy stories (aka science fiction).
But these are often the kinds of people that see all technology as some sort of magical force capable of anything, barely a step above being in a cargo cult. That’s the kind of constantly terrified, willfully ignorant person that latches onto conspiracy theories as a lifeline to try to make sense of a world they understand even less than your average person.