There is nothing metallic in the vaccine, panellists said on a Vaccine QnA run by a local university, rebuffing the idea that the AstraZeneca vaccine has some magnetic component that allows objects to stick to someone who has just had their shot.
Clinical microbiologist and infectious disease physician Professor Adam Jenney, and Professor Fiona Russel who is a paediatrician and epidemiologist appeared on a Fiji National University’s Explain the Science 1 panel discussion on the safety, efficacy and roll-out of the COVID19 vaccine used in Fiji. They were joined on the panel by Fiji’s Head of Vaccination Taskforce and Public Health specialist Dr Rachel Devi.
“Let’s look at what’s inside the vaccine, what makes the constituents of it. It’s got the constituents of any vaccine that we have which has the active agent, or the active ingredient that makes it cause the immune system. It has some chemicals that make it stable, there’s amino acid there’s a bit of salt, there’s a bit of magnesium there,” Dr Jenney said.
“These are all normal constituents, and I’m looking at the list, and there is nothing that is metallic there.”
Dr Russel described it as trickery.
“There’s nothing in there that can cause magnetic forces and things to stick, and I have certainly seen those videos too and I had a look into it.”
Dr Russel then licked and stuck a magnet onto her forehead to illustrate that “it’s not real and anybody can do this and make these videos.”
“It is certainly trickery and there’s nothing in there that has magnet force that will make that to happen. Its just oil on the skin and licking it.”
Fiji’s Ministry of Health also weighed in on the issue in a statement issued a short while ago stating: “COVID-19 vaccines do not contain ingredients that can produce an electromagnetic field at the site of your injection.”
Videos showing the same phenomenon have since been reproduced numerous times in Fiji including by some police officers who are being investigated by their employers for breaching internal policy related to social media use.
