At the end of June 2021, a video started circulating on social media that supposedly showed a pet scanner detecting a microchip from the COVID-19 vaccine in a person's arm:
This video does not show a pet scanner detecting a microchip from the COVID-19 vaccine in a person's arm. The COVID-19 vaccine does not contain any microchips. It does not make you magnetic and it does not insert anything into your body with a GPS signal.
This video was created as a joke.
This video was originally posted to TikTok by user jasmine_0708. While the original post was accompanied by surprise emojis and hashtags indicating that this was a side effect of the vaccine, this TikTok user was quick to clarify that this was just a joke.
Here's the original video:
While this TikTok user may have meant this short clip as a joke, the video was soon picked up and spread by other social media users in posts that contained no such disclaimers. As many people have already been led to believe (via anti-vaccination misinformation campaigns) that the COVID-19 vaccine contained some sort of microchip, some who encountered this video thought that it was real.
In June 2021, after similar videos went viral on TikTok that supposedly showed people detecting microchips via magnets, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told Gayle King on "CBS This Morning":
"We are not being injected with chips. What we’re being injected with is this incredible scientific breakthrough that keeps us safe and is effective against something that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans over the last 15 months.”