Having seen the crazy amount of disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, I decided to address some of the ridiculous claims that are directly related to my area of research, graphene. Before getting to busting some vaccine myths though, I’d like to share my view of such disinformation.
Unless you have been living under a rock, in some cave, or at the skirts of a remote mountain (if you do, I am jealous) you surely aware that the pandemic has brought forth the best and the worst of what humankind can offer to the modern society.
On one hand, we have doctors, nurses, and various other hospital staff working around the clock to keep us alive. We can hardly pay for their hard work, mostly because governments around the world will probably pat them on the back instead of paying for their hard work. They are the living breathing examples of compassion, sacrifice, selflessness, and defiance against odds.
On the other hand, we have disinformation. We will call it disinformation to stay in sync with the mainstream media terminology, while I would prefer to call outright lying. Lying is bad, people. When everyone lies, there cannot be a functioning society. Though I digress, elementary school ethics is not the topic of this post.
There has been rampant disinformation during the last few years. Mainstream media caught the wind during Trump’s initial campaign run. Although we can argue it was already present prior to that. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the sheer magnitude of disinformation has reached a new level.
More often than not, disinformation circling around is very easy to disprove. It is hard to imagine that the same people who post these nonsensical claims on social media platforms are not also capable of doing a quick google search to confirm the information they are posting.
Some questions come to mind when trying to understand why an audaciously wrong information finds its way to the internet:
Do they have an agenda to push? Political or religious… Which means they are lying, knowingly, deliberately…
Did they not try to confirm the information before posting? Which would indicate a total lack of shame and lack of accountability…
Are they a victim of confirmation bias? I use victim very loosely by the way. If you are incapable of saying what’s right instead of what you wish was right, you have some growing up to do. As adults, we are to be accountable for our actions, rather it be in real life or on the internet…
Are they trying to feel special by fooling people and having people come to them for answers? This would mean you are a complete **********. I will leave it to the reader to fill in the gaps. I have run into one last month; the person was masquerading as a molecular biologist. It was easy to confirm that he wasn’t, by a simple google scholar search.
Investigating the reasons behind this abhorrent behavior of spreading wrong information is someone else’s job – I am looking at you social psychologists. What we can and will do in this post is to bust some of the most ridiculous of myths about COVID-19 vaccine. We have two candidates: presence of graphene/graphene oxide in the vaccines and presence of microchips in the vaccines. Today, we will talk about graphene/graphene oxide.
Ewwww, graphene…
One of the claims I have run into on the internet is presence of graphene/graphene oxide. This hit really close to home for me, considering my previous research was all about graphene and graphene oxide.
Like a lot of conspiracy theories, how and why there would be graphene in a vaccine is quite vague in these claims. Some mention toxicities. Most do not mention anything and just say “hey, there is graphene in the vaccine, don’t take the vaccine!” I have also seen vague claims regarding mind control and such.
Of course, there is no graphene at all in the vaccine, but since this is not enough of an answer for conspiracy lovers, we are going to approach this discussion differently. First, we will assume there is graphene/graphene oxide in the vaccine and discuss what harm it could do. Then, we will explain why there wouldn’t be any graphene/graphene oxide in a vaccine.
First, let’s focus on toxicity. Toxicity of graphene and graphene oxide has been a hot topic in academia. Many studies showed that any toxicity depends on exposure amount, duration, and even the shape of the graphene particles. Hence, there have been conflicting results. Some studies found no toxicity at all, while others found acute toxicity. Acute means that there was some toxicity observed for a short amount of time post exposure. Any further toxicity would require a sustained intake of graphenes. Most of the research aim to study toxicity of sustained intake of graphenes, in case they can be useful for some medications.
It is also important to note that method of delivery matters. Directly breathing large amounts of nanoparticles is a bad idea, rather it be graphene or not. Although effects are extremely mild except for very extreme exposure cases. For example, graphene has been around for centuries. In 2003, graphene was characterized, meaning identified and analyzed, for the first time. Graphene is not something that was “invented” in 2003.
Graphite is the main component of pencils that we all have been using since elementary school. Remember the pencil grading, HB, 2B, etc. These gradings indicate how much graphite there is in a pencil compared to clay. More graphite there is, softer is the pencil. If there is a lot of clay, then you get a hard pencil. The amount of graphite in a pencil can be as high as >90% (9B grading). Now, if you take your graphite pencil and draw with it on a paper, applying lightest of pressure, almost just dragging it across, you will end up with a very faint line. This line is very faint, because it is very thin. If you were to look at it under a microscope, you would find out that you have just exfoliated thin layers of graphene and deposited them onto the paper.
Graphite is also used for dry lubrication products for heavy machinery as well as for the chain of high-performance motorbikes. What happens when the graphite coated chain rubs against the gears repeatedly? You exfoliate sheets of graphite. Whaaaaat??! Hence, humans have been exposed to graphene for centuries. No toxicity that required medical attention has ever been observed.
The toxicity of graphene and graphene oxide is a very complicated topic that would take many pages to discuss in detail. Frankly, it would be an overkill for the reader. I will attempt to simplify it as much as I can while preserving relevant data and objectivity.
First, the solubility of graphenes. Consensus is that graphene functionalized by proteins or biocompatible polymers are more soluble in water-based suspensions -like your blood, body in general. This increased solubility reduces or eliminates toxicity depending on concentration and size of the nanoparticles [2]. Some evidence suggests that this may be due to easier elimination of graphenes when they are more soluble in water.
Another issue is the size. The size of graphenes can determine which cells uptake (absorb) graphenes. In either case, lysosomes are utilized by cells for elimination and no adverse effects were found up to 100 um/mL.
Finally, exposure dosage matters. Extreme doses, such as 20 mg/mL of graphene functionalized to be soluble in water, can cause mitochondrial damage due to formation of reactive oxygen species. Note that this is an extremely high concentration and most times, it is not physically possible to produce a graphene suspension that dense. Polymer functionalized graphene suspensions can rarely be more than a couple mg/mL unless some solvent exchange method is used. Although, graphene oxide functionalized with dextran was not toxic even at 20 mg/mL [3]. Some of these studies were conducted in a petri dish (in vitro). They were aimed at characterization of uptake and damage potential. Furthermore, oxidation magnitude and nature of graphene oxide can change how toxic it is. Even then, they are not toxic to everything, only certain cell types [4].
What should we understand from this? First of all, these studies were conducted to see if graphene or graphene oxide can be used as a coating from drugs (pills and such) or as a functional material to target certain types of cells – for example, cancer cells. As such, researchers wanted to know the adverse effects of sustained exposure. Negative impact of single exposure often is less than drinking too much one night or eating a charcoaled steak. In fact, eating a few candy bars could be more damaging to the human body as sugar – and especially fructose sugar – is one of the most toxic edibles out there.
Now, why would we want graphene or graphene oxide in a vaccine or drug?
So far, to my knowledge, use of neither material was useful for any medication delivery method. They have no function in human body and eliminated quickly. Plain graphene oxide has a distribution phase of 2.2 minutes and 1.8 minutes in mice for small and large graphene oxide nanoparticles, respectively. The distributed graphene oxide nanoparticles were eliminated from the body in 170 minutes and 102 minutes for short and long graphene oxide, respectively [5]. Even special formulations to prolong blood circulation of graphene oxide has a half life of about 27 hours [6].
Using either material in vaccine would be ultimately unnecessary and difficult since both graphene and graphene oxide would require additional functionalizing polymers. These additional chemicals would have to be compatible with rest of the vaccine components. This can be surprisingly hard. For example, carboxymethyl cellulose that I had used in my research to make water-based graphene suspension is negatively impacted by salts in the liquid. For example, metallic salts such as iron chloride (trivalent salts, as chemists would say) destroy carboxymethyl cellulose functionalized graphene suspensions.
Hence, any attempt to formulate any medication using something that
- is eliminated quickly from the body,
- does nothing useful in the body,
- causes only mild inflammation due to low dose and non-sustained exposure, and
- is very hard to mix with other type of chemicals,
is not only a waste of energy and resources but also frankly stupid. Good luck securing any further research funding after spending money on that kind of endeavors.
Finally, the mind control or other fringe claims (or fringier, I would say). Graphene and graphene oxide are mere minuscule pieces of material, people. Your clothing thread is a nanoparticle if it is nanometer scale in one of its dimensions. These nanoparticles or any nanoparticle we produced to this day, has no capability to compute and transmit any form of signal/data. That sort of technology is at least 30 years away. We are not living on Marvel universe. There are no nanobots. There are only twitter bots and shills that spread such crazy ideas.
References
[1] Experiment on Pencil Resister Effect on Circuit Output. (2021). Retrieved 13 September 2021, from https://www.ukessays.com/essays/physics/experiment-pencil-resister-effect-circuit-9654.php
[2] Lalwani, G., D’Agati, M., Khan, A., & Sitharaman, B. (2016). Toxicology of graphene-based nanomaterials. Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews, 105, 109-144. doi: 10.1016/j.addr.2016.04.028
[3] Li, R., Guiney, L., Chang, C., Mansukhani, N., Ji, Z., & Wang, X. et al. (2018). Surface Oxidation of Graphene Oxide Determines Membrane Damage, Lipid Peroxidation, and Cytotoxicity in Macrophages in a Pulmonary Toxicity Model. ACS Nano, 12(2), 1390-1402. doi: 10.1021/acsnano.7b07737
[4] Seabra, A., Paula, A., de Lima, R., Alves, O., & Durán, N. (2014). Nanotoxicity of Graphene and Graphene Oxide. Chemical Research In Toxicology, 27(2), 159-168. doi: 10.1021/tx400385x
[5] Xu, C., Shi, S., Feng, L., Chen, F., Graves, S., & Ehlerding, E. et al. (2016). Long circulating reduced graphene oxide–iron oxide nanoparticles for efficient tumor targeting and multimodality imaging. Nanoscale, 8(25), 12683-12692. doi: 10.1039/c5nr09193d
[6] Zhang, S., Yang, K., Feng, L., & Liu, Z. (2011). In vitro and in vivo behaviors of dextran functionalized graphene. Carbon, 49(12), 4040-4049. doi: 10.1016/j.carbon.2011.05.056
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