The year 2020 is certainly going to be a memorable one in the history books. Not only have COVID-19, Black Lives Matter police-brutality protests, white supremacy-fueled violence, Brexit’s culmination in the United Kingdom and one of the most-watched elections in U.S. history dominated the headlines, but the world has suffered an alarming increase in natural disasters since the New Year, including earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, flooding, wildfires and even locust infestations.
When the terrifying concept of giant murder hornets is now just a footnote in yesterday’s news, mere months after the insects first showed up, you know it’s been a rough year. So it’s no surprise, in such a stressed-out news climate, that people are quick to believe and disseminate bizarre conspiracy theories, regardless of whether or not they have any basis in reality. The latest one making the rounds involves radio frequency identification technology, and it’s a doozy—but please don’t believe a word of it.
Throughout the pandemic, biotechnology company Moderna and other firms have been working to develop vaccines that could alleviate or eliminate the coronavirus. These companies have coordinated their efforts with Dr. Anthony Fauci, a highly respected epidemics expert and immunologist with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci’s efforts to keep the U.S. government’s coronavirus programs from going off the rails on a crazy train, and to urge folks to wear masks despite high-ranking politicians refusing to do so, have earned him vast praise in the face of adversity.
And yet… a recent viral text-based hoax linked Fauci and Moderna with Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, philanthropic financier George Soros and others—and RFID was pulled into the mix, because of course it was. According to an Aug. 1 article posted at Snopes, the text, which claimed Moderna plotted with the above individuals against the public good for nefarious reasons, actually originated as a tongue-in-cheek spoof of ridiculous conspiracy theories, illustrating how poorly written and baseless they tend to be. That, however, didn’t stop it from going viral anyway, nor did it prevent people from buying into the claim, despite how silly and over the top it is.
The text reads:
“The vaccine that is coming… As many of you heard Moderna is in stage 3 of their vaccine testing. If all goes well it’ll become federal law to get the vaccine. Here’s something many of you don’t know, guess who the first CEO of Moderna was? A Cornell graduate by the name of Anthony Fauci, who was a roommate with none other than Bill Gates. Are you paying attention? It was at Cornell that Bill Gates designed the RFID (Radio-frequency identification) and patented it under US2006257852. Are you awake yet? Now let’s really go down the rabbit hole. Moderna was a pharmaceutical company that started in Germany under the name IG Farben. IG Farben is infamous for it’s mass production of Zyklon-B, the primary gas used to kill millions during the Holocaust. After Germany fell, IG Farben was dissolved and its assets sold off by a Nazi turned American by the name of, you guessed it, George Soros. Soros rebranded the company as Moderna. And who was the primary stockholder of Moderna until his death? Jeffrey Epstein. His role in Moderna is where he made his fortune and established his connections. Let that sink in. Wake up people! You are being conditioned and controlled.”
Now, in case anyone in RFID Journal’s audience was among those taken in (I doubt it, as you’re a savvy lot), please let Snopes writer David Mikkelson put your concerns to rest. As his article explained, the text was clearly a joke, as many of its points are provably false with even minimal research. Fauci has never been Moderna’s CEO, nor did he go to college with Gates, who attended a different university (not Cornell) a decade after Fauci had finished medical school. Moreover, Soros did not “dissolve” IG Farben, nor was he a Nazi—or even German—and he was only a kid during the Second World War. And while Epstein was involved in despicable activities before his death under highly questionable circumstances, he was not a primary holder of Moderna stock.
It’s the RFID portion of the text that matters most for our purposes. As Snopes rightly noted (and as many of you are no doubt already aware), Bill Gates neither designed nor patented radio frequency identification chips. “The first such patent was taken out in 1973 by Mario Cardullo,” the site explained, “and the patent number provided in the message text (US2006257852) actually points to a patent related to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus rather than any RFID technology.” Cardullo himself, in a 2003 article for RFID Journal, discussed how he came up with the idea in 1969 (see Genesis of the Versatile RFID Tag). In 1973, Gates was only 18 years old—in fact, he’d only enrolled in college that same year. In 1969, he was in ninth grade.
So there you have it. Conspiracy theorists have been targeting RFID for years, but per usual, this particular story holds no water—nor was it ever meant to since it originated as a spoof of the people who typically tell such tales. Gates, Fauci, Epstein and Soros have all been in the news a great deal lately, as have RFID, vaccine-development efforts and Moderna, making them prime pawns to name-check in the spoof. For a conspiracy to take hold quickly, the masses need to recognize the players involved, and in this regard the pranksters did their job well. Regrettably, the end result was that the joke generated negative headlines for RFID, Gates and Fauci at a time when all three are vital to our getting through the pandemic safely.
Nazis, meanwhile, have gone hand in hand with conspiracy theories ever since the first claims arose that Adolf Hitler had faked his death and escaped to Argentina with Eva Braun, where they lived happily ever after in evil secrecy. As demonstrated by countless movies and TV shows, Nazis are the low-hanging fruit waiting to be plucked (sorry, Indiana Jones), so naturally they were dropped into the hoax text. But the Nazis, the above-named public figures and RFID are not connected in a secret, sinister cabal bent on dominating mankind, nor is RFID being used to condition or control the population. The only thing missing from this spoof is an extraterrestrial plot to take over the Earth—a flat Earth, of course. Pass the tin-foil hat, please.
Rich Handley has been the managing editor of RFID Journal since 2005. Rich has authored, edited or contributed to numerous books about pop culture and is also the editor of Eaglemoss’s Star Trek Graphic Novel Collection.