On April 22, 2026, Discovery aired "The Great COVID Conspiracy," season one, episode four of Conspiracies & Coverups, the series in which former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante pressure-tests popular conspiracy theories using intelligence tradecraft, expert interviews, and real-world analysis. The series premiered April 1, 2026, at 10PM ET/PT on Discovery Channel, produced by Texas Crew Productions with New York Post Entertainment.
The episode works through COVID-19's origin theories: natural spillover, lab-related, and accidental release. My part comes at the question the pandemic hard-wired into my inbox: were there RFID chips in the vaccines? In the extended cut embedded below, the chapter is labeled "RFID chips in vaccines?" and starts at 32:09.
My answer on that question has been on the record for years, because the physics does not budge: the transponders I work with are passive (as I put it on Dr. Phil in 2022, "they're dead. They're inert. They have no energy whatsoever") and they do nothing without a reader up close.
Two clips are archived here. The first is the extended cut of the episode. The second is a small outtake that did not make the aired episode: Bustamante asking me how I got into this in the first place. Thirty-eight seconds, and a fair question twenty-one years in.