Does a video show a microchip reader used for pets presumably registering a chip in a person's arm where she was vaccinated? No, that's not true: The company that makes the reader couldn't find any information linked to the number that flashed on the screen briefly when the reader was held near a woman's arm.
Lead Stories researched the microchip number and found that it was from a chip made by the same pet microchip company as the scanner. That means it's a chip to be used for animals, but it was not registered to anybody at the time of writing.
The claim appeared in a TikTok video reposted to Instagram (archived here) where it was published on June 26, 2021, with the caption "Thoughts?" The text edited onto the video reads:
Supposedly this is a scanner used for chipped animals.
The video, which appears to be set in a medical or veterinary facility, shows a woman with her arms at her side and slightly out, while another woman holds the scanner. The right arm is scanned and the words "NO ID FOUND" can be read on the scanner. The left arm, which she says on the video is where she was vaccinated, is then scanned and the number 985141003154180 appears on the screen. The woman holding the scanner scans the arms again, right to left, and the same thing happens.
While the video and its audio do not claim outright that the reader is picking up a chip presumably embedded in the woman's arm where she was vaccinated, the implication is clear.
First, Lead Stories reached out to HomeAgain, the company that makes the pet scanner seen in the video. In a phone call on June 28, 2021, a representative from HomeAgain said:
Microchip numbers, a large majority of them are going to start with the number 9 and they're going to be 15 digits long. So this is why this one reads like a microchip number. But it says that it's an unusual number, so most likely it belongs to a whole bunch of microchipping companies, but I have no information particularly on this microchip.
Lead Stories emailed Careismatic Brands on June 28, 2021, the company that sells the top that the woman being scanned was wearing in the video, hoping to find out if there was a metal chip in the sleeve of the shirt that would explain the scanner picking up a code.
Wendell Mobley, vice president of Careismatic Brands, said in a phone call on June 29, 2021, that there was "no chip, wiring, or RFID chip" in the sleeves of the top the woman was wearing, thus eliminating the clothing as possibly being the source of the chip read. RFID (radio-frequency identification) uses electromagnetic fields to identify and track tags attached to objects.
We decided to look up the number using petmicrochiplookup.org. The results showed that the number belongs to a HomeAgain microchip -- meant to be embedded in a pet for tracking if the pet is lost -- but it was not yet registered to anyone.
Lead Stories has written multiple stories debunking claims that the COVID-19 vaccine contains a microchip used for tracking. Some stories are linked here, here and here.
