False claim that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips emerged from entrenched theory about ‘world elite’
Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health recently produced a pamphlet titled: “Fact Check: Getting a COVID-19 vaccine will not implant you with microchips or needles.”
The document points out that the vaccines don’t contain microchips “or any kind of tracking device.”
It goes on to assure people that the needle is not left in your arm when you get the vaccine and that videos claiming to show magnets sticking to people’s bodies after they were vaccinated is “just a trick.”
L.A.’s public health department has produced this information because it believes it has to. An Economist/YouGov poll this month found that 20% of Americans worry that the COVID-19 vaccines might contain microchips.
The supposed purpose of putting microchips in the vaccines: to allow “Deep State” actors and secretive corporations to control our thoughts and actions.
This is an old conspiracy theory that has evolved over the decades, pointing the finger first at the world-affairs discussion groups the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, and now at the philanthropic organization The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Trilateral Commission was a frequent target of the late perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, who accused the commission of running the international drug trade. Larouche, who fielded candidates for local offices across the U.S. in the 1980s and ’90s, called the Holocaust “mythical.”
Conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, who died in 2019, believed Queen Elizabeth was a drug pusher. (AP Photo/Joe Marquette, File)AP
Televangelist Pat Robertson agreed with LaRouche’s views on the Trilateral Commission, insisting in 1991 that it rose up “from the depth of something that is evil.”
Robertson warned that the commission represented a coming “world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all.”
The Bilderberg Group attracted the same blinkered suspicion. Its critics, the BBC noted in 2011, have accused the Davos-like organization “of everything from deliberately engineering the credit crunch to planning to kill 80% of the world population.” The Bilderberg Group has been a favorite punching bag of popular internet fabulist Alex Jones.
Just how outlandish is this belief in “elite” villains in bespoke business suits gathering to plot against the rest of us?
One offshoot of the conspiracy theory insists that the all-powerful cabal is, in fact, not actually comprised of humans. They are just posing as such and are instead “blood-drinking, flesh-eating, shape-shifting extraterrestrial reptilian humanoids.” Among the lizard people: former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Queen Elizabeth and the late comedian Bob Hope.
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British former professional football player David Icke is a firm believer that the “Reptilian Elite,” as Time magazine jokingly called them, secretly run the world. Last year, Twitter permanently banned Icke from its social-media platform after he made a torrent of false claims, including that the coronavirus was somehow “linked to the rollout of the 5G mobile network.”
Fears that the coronavirus pandemic is being used (or had been purposely started) to aid a secret microchip program have been gathering steam for more than a year.
Philanthropist Bill Gates has been accused of playing a role in various nefarious conspiracies. (Ludovic Marin/Pool Photo via AP)AP
News outfits initially felt compelled to debunk it back in May 2020, when the vaccines were still in early development, after “the head of the Russian Communist Party … said that so-called ‘globalists’ supported ‘a covert mass chip implantation which they may in time resort to under the pretext of a mandatory vaccination against coronavirus.’”
Roger Stone, the long-time Republican strategist who former President Donald Trump pardoned last year following his conviction on charges related to 2016 election-interference allegations, has backed this Russian theory.
After Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates speculated in late 2020 that eventually there might be some kind of “digital certificates” to prove who had immunity to the coronavirus, The Gates Foundation publicly declared that the microchip-in-the-vaccines claims were “false.”
Such denials, of course, tend only to harden the views of those who believe this conspiracy theory.
In the Economist/YouGov poll, 5% of the 1,490 Americans surveyed said it was “definitely true” that the “U.S. government is using the COVID-19 vaccine to microchip the population.” Another 15% said it was “probably true,” and 14% said they were “not sure.”
Twenty-three percent of the poll’s respondents said they’d heard “a lot” about QAnon, the internet-birthed conspiracy theory that Satanic global elites run both an international pedophile ring and governments around the world.
— Douglas Perry
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