When Vaccine Fears Mimic SNL Skits: Magnetic People

In June 2021, a physician testifying before the Ohio state legislature claimed that COVID vaccines made people magnetic. Then a registered nurse from Strongsville tried to prove it.

On February 13, 2024, National Geographic Books will be publishing a book I wrote called, TELL ME WHEN IT’S OVER: AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO DECIPHERING COVID MYTHS AND NAVIGATING A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD. Before publication, I will be writing about various issues discussed in that book.

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Sherri Tenpenny is a physician and alternative health entrepreneur who offers paid boot camps on anti-vaccine activism. On June 8, 2021, she appeared before the Ohio state legislature on behalf of House Bill 248, which would eliminate vaccine mandates. Tenpenny wasn’t new to the anti-vaccine community. She had previously claimed that the COVID pandemic is a scam, that masks suppress the immune system, and that COVID vaccines are “a genocidal, DNA-manipulating, infertility-causing, dementia-causing machine.” She also blamed the Sandy Hook massacre on vaccines. In support of HB248, Tenpenny went one step further. "I'm sure you've seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they're magnetized," Tenpenny said. "You can put a key on their forehead, it sticks. You can put spoons and forks all over and they can stick.”

Tenpenny’s testimony was followed by a show-and-tell. Joanna Overholt, a registered nurse from Strongsville, Ohio, supported Tenpenny's testimony by placing a key and a hairpin against her chest and neck. "Explain to me why the key sticks to me. It sticks to my neck, too. So, yeah, if somebody could explain this, that would be great," she said. Later, the key fell from her neck but not her chest. 

Tenpenny’s claim was undermined by several facts. mRNA vaccines contain lipids, potassium chloride, monobasic potassium phosphate, sodium chloride, dibasic sodium phosphate dihydrate, and sucrose. None of which are paramagnetic. In response to Tenpenny’s claims, Michael Coey, a professor of physics at Trinity College in Dublin, said, “you would need about one gram of iron metal to attract and support a permanent magnet at the injection site, something you would easily feel if it was there.” The response from Joe Schwarcz, PhD, the Director of McGill’s Office of Science and Society, and the author of Monkeys, Myths, and Molecules: Separating Fact from Fiction in the Science of Everyday Life, was more dramatic. “Our liver, which is loaded with iron, isn’t ripped out of our body when we get an MRI scan,” he said. “And people who get iron injections or take iron supplements, which do contain ferrous or ferric ions that are paramagnetic, do not become magnetized.”

Finally, to show how people could be fooled into thinking they had become magnets, Schwarcz took a picture of himself with a spoon “stuck” to his nose (shown above). He explained how an oily substance called sebum, which is produced by sebaceous glands in our skin, allowed him to create the appearance of being magnetic.

You can’t make this stuff up.