Authors
Online users have claimed the US Supreme Court has ruled that vaccinated people are products, patented goods, and no longer human.
One such user tweeted this claim with hashtag #transhuman and an image that reads, “BREAKING – In the US, the Supreme Court has ruled that vaccinated people worldwide are products, patented goods, according to US law, no longer human.”
Image in the claim further reads, “Since 2013, all people vaccinated with GM-modified mRNAs are legally trans-human and legally identified as trans-human and do not enjoy any human or other rights of a state, and this applies worldwide..”
Another user’s tweet reads, “US Supreme Court ruled that people with RNA/DNA vaccine worldwide are products, patented goods and no longer human.”
The above claim with the caption ‘US Supreme Court has ruled that vaccinated people are products’ has been widely shared on Twitter and Facebook in the past few weeks.
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Fact Check / Verification
The online posts link the vaccine technology to a 2013 US Supreme Court case involving the Association for Molecular Pathology and Myriad Genetics.
As per the ruling, Myriad “obtained several patents after discovering the precise location and sequence of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, mutations of which can dramatically increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer.”
Ir further stated, “A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.”
Contrary to the claim in the online posts, the court did not find that the human genome could be patented if it was modified.
Note that the Court’s decision does not even include the words “vaccine” or “vaccines” anywhere.
mRNA vaccines are a new type of vaccine that “teach our cells how to make a protein—or even just a piece of a protein—that triggers an immune response inside our bodies,” according to Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Ana Santos Rutschman, a vaccine law expert, told AFP that the Court case referred to in the online posts “is not related to the question of determining who/what is human and what is not. There’s no relationship between this case and any claim related to the administration of any type of vaccine, including mRNA vaccines.”
Lara Cartwright-Smith, Associate Professor of Health Policy, George Washington University told AAP that “receiving an mRNA vaccine does not and cannot alter one’s DNA, so the basis for the claim is wrong.”
“A person cannot be legally patented. While the Supreme Court ruling said cDNA could be patented, this in no way affected the legal status of the person who underwent the relevant procedure,” she added.
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Conclusion
The US Supreme Court has NOT ruled that vaccinated people are products, patented goods, and no longer human. Nor do mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines alter the human genome. The claim’s content has no basis in fact.
Result: False
Our Sources
2013 US Supreme Court Ruling: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-398_1b7d.pdf
Centres for Disease Control and Prevention: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/mrna.html
AFP: https://factcheck.afp.com/http%253A%252F%252Fdoc.afp.com%252F9F79UG-1
Australian Associated Press: https://www.aap.com.au/vaccine-transhuman-claims-patently-wrong-on-us-supreme-court-ruling/
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