Concepts

Is there nanotechnology in the COVID-19 vaccines?

49AI analysisDocumented

An idea drawn from this archive’s research and journal, either the author’s own speculation or generated by AI, and labelled as such.

Yes, in one specific and published sense. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are mRNA vaccines, and the mRNA is carried inside lipid nanoparticles: tiny spheres made of four kinds of fat, one of them cholesterol. A lipid nanoparticle is about the size of a virus. It protects the fragile mRNA on its way into the body's cells, is taken up by them, and releases the mRNA, which the cell uses to make one viral protein for a short time before it breaks down. That is nanomedicine, and the full ingredient lists are published by regulators, including the FDA, Health Canada and the European Medicines Agency.

What a lipid nanoparticle is not is a device. It has no electronics, sensors, antennas, power source or means of sending a signal. The nanotechnology that can record from or stimulate the brain is a different kind of thing: electrode arrays placed by surgery, injectable mesh electronics, or magnetoelectric nanoparticles that need an outside magnetic field and are still being tested in laboratories and animals. None of these appears on any published vaccine ingredient list.

On the record: since 2021, claims that COVID-19 vaccines contain graphene oxide or other graphene materials have been checked by fact-checkers including Reuters, AFP and PolitiFact, and found false. Graphene oxide is not on any published ingredient list, and Pfizer has stated it is not used in making its vaccine. One early source of the claim was a report from a university in Spain that was not peer-reviewed.

Why the question appears in this archive: statements recorded in the journal suggest that nanotechnology "has been dispersed into the community", and connect it with the vaccines that most of the country received. The author has also noted that the first experience unlike anything before came within weeks of his first COVID-19 vaccination (see Why Hasn't It Been Turned Off?). Those are his questions, and they are kept as questions. This concept records what the published ingredients show. It does not explain the experiences the archive describes, and two events close together in time do not show that one caused the other (see Next to each other is not because of each other).

  • Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines use lipid nanoparticles of four lipids (an ionisable lipid, DSPC, cholesterol and a PEG-lipid)
  • Ingredient lists are published by regulators, among them Health Canada
  • Graphene oxide claims rated false by multiple fact-checkers since 2021; Pfizer stated graphene oxide is not used
  • Nanotechnology that records from or stimulates the brain requires electrodes or particles driven from outside; none is on a published ingredient list

Open questions

  • This concept addresses what is in the published ingredients. It does not address the safety record of the vaccines, which is a separate medical question for a doctor or a regulator's published data.
  • It does not explain the experiences recorded in the journal; it only removes one proposed mechanism from the record.

Not independently verified

This concept reports published ingredient lists and the outcome of published fact-checks. It makes no claim about the cause of any experience described in this archive, and it is not medical advice.

Topics: Nanotechnology · Technology

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Did anyone try to build a way in without surgery?

Yes, openly, and the programme documents say so. DARPA's Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology programme — N3 — set out, in its own words, to develop high-performance bi-directional brain-machine interfaces for able-bodied service members. Bi-directional means read and write. Able-bodied means the purpose was not restoring lost function; the stated applications were controlling unmanned vehicles and cyber-defence systems. Six teams were funded in 2019. The published performance targets were specific: sixteen independent channels, within sixteen cubic millimetres of neural tissue, at fifty milliseconds of latency, using light, acoustic or electromagnetic energy rather than implanted electrodes. One funded team, led by Battelle, took a route between surgery and none. Its project, BrainSTORMS, proposed injecting magnetoelectric nanoparticles, guiding them to a region of the brain, and reading from and writing to them through a helmet. That is the programme's clearest link to nanotechnology. It is still an injection, and it was a research proposal, not a system shown working in a person. The programme is now listed as complete and retained for reference. What this establishes is intent and investment, publicly recorded. It does not establish that the targets were met, and the targets themselves describe a person wearing equipment, not a person at a distance.

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What did the see-through brain interface actually do?

In January 2024 Psychology Today reported on a study from the University of California San Diego, published in Nature Nanotechnology, that built a brain interface you can see through. The electrodes are made of graphene, a sheet of carbon one atom thick, so the whole array is transparent. It was placed on the surface of a mouse brain, under the skull. The array recorded electrical signals from the brain's surface. At the same time, a two-photon microscope shone its laser through the array and watched neurons up to 250 micrometres deep (a quarter of a millimetre) light up as they fired, using calcium imaging. The researchers then trained an artificial intelligence model on the two recordings together, so that it learned to predict the deeper activity from the surface signals alone. The authors report that it could predict both the average activity and the activity of single cells. That is the real advance, and it is a general one. Once the model has learned the relationship, the microscope is no longer needed: the surface array alone gives an estimate of activity it cannot directly measure, so an animal can be observed for longer while it moves freely. This is how neural decoding works in general. A device records what it can reach, and a model, trained against something that could see more, fills in the rest. The conditions matter as much as the result. The work was done in

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