Getting a Covid-19 vaccine doesn’t mean you can connect to Bluetooth

A post on Facebook has claimed to show evidence that getting the Pfizer or AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccinations makes you magnetic at the injection site. The post also includes what it claims is video evidence of this happening, as well as a screenshot of the user’s Bluetooth settings page, which the user claims shows codes for the people nearby who have been vaccinated.

As we have written before, the vaccines physically cannot make you magnetic. There’s nothing in them that could do that and videos claiming to show this are likely to be showing the effect of adhesion of a small, light object to the arm thanks to moisture on the skin’s surface.

There is nothing in the vaccine that could possibly have anything to do with Bluetooth. The vaccines are made up of a number of chemicals, and don’t contain anything capable of transmitting short distance radio waves, which is what Bluetooth is. The vaccines don’t contain microchips, or anything of the sort. 

The post says: “theres [sic] a bluetooth rumour too, I scanned my mum and dad and the bottom numbers on the photo came up, AC on dad and EC on mum.”

The screenshot in the post shows what appears to be a few different devices that the phone has connected to in the past, including what appears to be car stereos and speakers. At the bottom of the screenshot are three other “available devices”, two of which the user seems to be claiming are the vaccines in her parents.

These codes are MAC (Media Access Control) addresses—12 character codes that identify pieces of hardware that can connect to each other. Devices like mobile phones, computers, gaming consoles and even things like WiFi enabled washing machines all have them. The phone screen in the Facebook post even says: “Device name will appear when this device is connected.”

We searched the same addresses beginning “AC” and “EC” that were shown in the Facebook post on several MAC address look-up websites. The “EC” code, which the Facebook user claimed was her mother’s vaccine, is actually a product from the company Logitech, which makes wireless accessories, and the “AC” code will be a product made by a company called Chongqing Fegui Electronics, which appears to be the manufacturer of a number of devices, including video players, laptops and printers.

If you look at the Bluetooth settings on your mobile phone, you are likely to see a number of  other available devices that your phone has never connected to. These are the devices in the area around you. If you’re at home, you may see your neighbours’ devices listed, or if you are on public transport, your fellow travellers’ tech items. 

The appearance of these MAC addresses does not prove that the vaccine contains anything untoward that can connect via Bluetooth.