People who believe conspiracies (not necessarily Conspiracy Theorists, but also people who aren’t ‘all in’) have said microchips are being put into vaccines to track people or for some other nefarious purpose. My sister thought ‘They’ were putting microchips in the swine flu vaccine back in the '70s.
Ignoring that many of these believers will not be swayed by facts, I’m curious: How small is the smallest microchip that can actually do whatever it is people think they do? What is the inside diameter of vaccination needles? (For reference, a microchip that does not send a signal, but can be read by a scanner, used for identifying pets is about the size of a grain of rice.)
Apparently, pretty small; 0.1mm cubed. Sounds experimental at the moment from this article, and I don’t know what it is “those people” think it “does,” but there it is.
1. A COVID-19 vaccine will have a microchip embedded in it.
Answer Provided: False
Correct Answer: False
Sometimes there are microchips on the outside of a syringe, so the health care professional can scan it quickly for digital records. But they are never located inside the needle. In fact, even the world’s tiniest microchip is much too big to insert into an immunization shot. Vaccines are given with a 22 to 25 gauge needle. A 22 gauge needle’s inner diameter is about 0.41 mm – smaller than a 1 mm microchip.
The article says that ‘the world’s smallest microchip’ is ten times larger than the one in the article you linked; but as you say, that one sounds like it’s just been developed.
Well, if there are microchips on the outside of a syringe, surely nefarious government scientists can make sure they stick firmly enough so that when the needle goes in, chips are embedded in the muscle for later identification and tracking purchases. That way, the vaccine itself is never implicated.
Oh sure, that’s what they say. You think the gubmint is gonna tell us the truth? There are smaller ones, small enough to be in the needle & the gubmint is injecting them into us, I heard all about it…somewhere.
You’re never going to convince certain people, even when presenting them with so-called ‘facts’.
I know this was tongue in cheek, but the syringe is the plastic part that gets filled with vaccine. The part that goes in your arm is the needle. . . .
So let’s pretend there is a microchip in the vaccine. How will it “work” according to the conspiracy theorists? What will it do?
Are they saying it will transmit and/or receive data all on its own? If so, the microchip will need a power source. And there will need to be an antenna.
Are they saying a local scanner will be able to read it? Sort of like RFID? If so, the chip will still need an antenna. RF antennas are not small.
I’m sure there is a smartphone app that can detect any microchips surreptitiously injected in your body. Just make sure you always have your phone handy to make sure no one is tracking you.
Where I live was once the biggest manufacturer of needles and fish hooks in the world. In more recent times it is no longer a cottage industry and is a much-reduced enterprise.
There is a company that still makes medical (hollow and stitching) needles and my MIL used to work for them. They told a story, that when a Japanese company started to make hollow needles and they sent some samples over, the company inserted one of their finest needles in the sample and returened it.
It might be worth mentioning that the practical impossibility of a tracking chip in a vaccine will make little impact on the anti-vax conspiracy theorists, because they’ve already overcome an even bigger logical hurdle: the one of motivation. Why would Big Government have any interest in tracking them? Or, as Bill Maher recently put it (paraphrased): Big Government and its spy agencies have NO interest in tracking your fat ass when you go to Piggly Wiggly.
Beyond that, they’d just go buy that information from Google or Apple if they really needed it. Since they’re not somehow correlating the injections with the person receiving them, they’d be doing aggregate data gathering, which is what those companies already do, with the added bonus of having information on what you view/do on your phones.
Getting that info from Google/Apple would be better information for any sort of aggregate purpose than what the government would get from inserting fantastically tiny microchips into someone’s arm.
I really didn’t want a GQ to devolve into bashing people who think there are microchips in vaccines. [Comments withheld.] My question was because while I knew it was impossible to inject a microchip with a vaccine, I didn’t know the actual dimensions.
My question has been answered, but an additional question was ‘What do these alleged microchips do?’
I was thinking the exact same thing. A chip on its own is just an inert thing unless it has power, and we don’t have power sources that small. The smallest tracking devices are many, many sizes larger than what can go in a needle. Massively bigger.
I hadn’t even considered the antenna part of the equation.
Is that like when I run a stud finder over my chest and wink at my wife saying “looks like we found one” and she rolls her eyes in disgust? (Yeah I’m that guy.)
I’ve heard the same story, but with Swiss v. German drill manufacturers, as well as WWII-era US v. UK machinists battling it out. I’ll add the US v. Japanese needle manufacturers to the list now!
What the CTers are missing is the fact that by now it is too late for the vast majority of them. The tracking microchips are implanted shortly after birth these days. If you have ever had a blood test, you have the microchips in your system.
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it smart… you can’t even beat sense into it with a 2x4”
Logic won’t help with some people.
In pre-covid days I was not happy with my credit and debit cars’ tap function (no PIN required). Yes there’s a small chip in the card, but if you find and cut the antenna trace like I did, the remote read no longer functions. No power and no response broadcast.
What powers this chip? Battery tech would suffer from the square-cub law. A chip and battery 1/10 the dimension has 1/1000 the battery volume… Sci-Fi and mystery shows tend to show some simple tracking device that runs for weeks, but anything with a battery will probably die pretty quick if it has to always broadcast. There’s a reason why tagged wild animals are carrying a decent package of batteries. Yes you can tag a worker bee with a chip glued to its back, but it has to pass through a reader at the hive entrance. And solar powered devices are kind of useless deep inside your arm, under an inch of flesh plus layers of clothes. (There may be a market for foil sweaters…)
All these sci-fi and paranoia theories tend to ignore a simple fact- any such chip setup requires power. unless the reader is held almost right up against the skin to also induce power. The smaller the antenna the stronger/closer the reader inducing power has to be. This is complicated by the chip being embedded in flesh, not air… Aren’t those doggie chips embedded in a place like the ear with less flesh in the way and not very deep? Whereas with COVID, the needle goes a LONG way into the arm.
