Newsmax Reporter Claims Covid-19 Vaccines Have ‘Luciferase’ To Track You

Just because Uranus sounds like your you-know-what doesn’t mean that the planet is made out of poop. Similarly, luciferase enzymes have very little to do with Lucifer.

Nevertheless, Emerald Robinson, Newsmax’s White House correspondent, recently tweeted out something that had seemingly little to do with being a White House correspondent. Her tweet claimed that “the vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked. Read the last book of the New Testament to see how this ends.”

Speaking of tracking, Robinson apparently subsequently deleted her tweet, but not before Justin Baragona, a reporter for The Daily Beast, captured it for posterity:

Now if you are wondering what Newsmax is, it’s not a brand of sanitary napkin. Instead, Newsmax media includes a website, a print magazine, and a cable news channel. In July, I covered for Forbes how a Newsmax anchor suggested that Covid-19 vaccines may be “going against nature.” Recently, Brooke Migdon writing for The Hill described Newsmax as a “pro-Trump outlet that was sued this year for promoting election fraud conspiracies, questioned mainstream climate science and told readers not to “worry too much about CO₂ baking the planet.”

As you can see, Robinson’s tweet quoted another tweet that said, “The Moderna vaccine DOES contain Luciferase.” After all, if you say it in ALL CAPS, it must be true, right?

OK, first of all, luciferase is a class of enzymes that can catalyze a chemical reaction to produce light. This reaction uses a combination of oxygen, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), and compounds called luciferins. This is the basis of bioluminescence, which is when living organisms emit light.

For example, in order to do their glowing thing, fireflies use firefly luciferin or (4S)-2-(6-hydroxy-1,3-benzothiazol-2-yl)-4,5-dihydrothiazole-4-carboxylic acid, which looks like a ridiculously strong password. Marc Branham has described for Scientific American in greater detail how these reactions occur and why fireflies do their lighting up thing. Firefly larvae can glow to warn predators, “don’t eat me. I taste like bleep.” By contrast, adult fireflies can use glowing or flash patterns for mating. Female fireflies may choose mates based on the flashing patterns of males. Males with higher flashing mates and greater flash intensity may be more attractive to females.

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily work for humans. In general, flashing of any type may not make you more attractive to human females. And showing up to a dinner date looking like a gigantic light bulb probably won’t earn you a second date, unless the restaurant is really dark.

Fireflies certainly aren’t the only organisms to use luciferin reactions to produce light. Certain types of snails, dinoflagellates, bacteria, and fungi have luciferins and luciferase as well.

So do Covid-19 vaccines have either luciferase or luciferins as Robinson suggested? Well, do you see either of these in list of ingredients for the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine posted on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) web site? That would be a hard no. This list has messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), lipids (SM-102, polyethylene glycol [PEG] 2000 dimyristoyl glycerol [DMG], cholesterol, and 1,2-distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine [DSPC]), tromethamine, tromethamine hydrochloride, acetic acid, sodium acetate trihydrate, and sucrose but nothing that looks like luciferase or luciferins. The same applies for the Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines.

It’s not as if humans have been glowing after they got the Covid-19 vaccine. Have you heard anyone say, “now that Susan’s gotten fully vaccinated, we can see her in the dark and have no more need for a night light?” So what the heck was Robison talking about when she tweeted “so that you can be tracked?” And how did this whole luciferase in Covid-19 vaccines claim even get started?

Well, take a look at what Alexandra Becker wrote in July 2020 for the Texas Medical Center. She described how scientists at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) have been firefly luciferase to “develop faster and more accurate diagnostic tests for Covid-19 as well as to analyze potential therapies and gain a clearer understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself.” These scientists have been inserting the luciferase enzyme into the genomes of viruses like the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the West Nile virus, and the Zika virus. This then can produce light, which in turn can make it easier to track what’s happening to the viruses and where they are going in a cell culture, especially when various Covid-19 treatments are tested on them.

So, if you are a gigantic virus in an even larger laboratory, then yes, scientists may use luciferase track where you are going. However, there’s no evidence that scientists are using luciferases in Covid-19 vaccines to track where humans are going.

Similarly, there’s no evidence that the devil is somehow involved with the Covid-19 vaccines. The luciferase claims on social media may be yet another example of folks twisting out of contact the mention of Covid-19 and something else together. Whenever you hear a claim about vaccines on social media, don’t draw any conclusions until you dig deeper into the claim. In other words, try to shed more light on the real situation. You know that saying, “the devil is in the details?” Well, in this case, the details have nothing to do with the devil.