Conspiracy theorists mistake Boss Metal Zone distortion pedal schematic for COVID-19 vaccine "5G chip"

Boss
(Image credit: Boss)

These are strange times indeed, and the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 vaccines are part of a government conspiracy to track people has now reached new levels of silly in Italy. 

A group has been caught out sharing a diagram online and claiming it to be the schematic for an injectable 'Covid-19 5G chip'. Except it's not – it's the reworked schematic for a custom true bypass version of the Boss Metal Zone distortion pedal.

Mario Fusco, a senior software engineer at Redhat, flagged up the glaring error on Twitter. And whoever edited the schematic to support their conspiracy claims added '5G Freq' but failed to remove telltale terms like footswitch, bass, treble and volume.

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Mario was understandably bemused. “Here in Italy people started to share this figure claiming that this is the diagram of the 5G chip that has been inserted in the COVID vaccine,” he tweeted. “In reality it is the electric circuit of a guitar pedal.”

Twitter responded in kind. with a barrage of mockery towards the conspiracy theorists. We'll leave you with are some of our favourites: 

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Rob Laing
Guitars Editor, MusicRadar

I'm the Guitars Editor for MusicRadar, handling news, reviews, features, tuition, advice for the strings side of the site and everything in between. Before MusicRadar I worked on guitar magazines for 15 years, including Editor of Total Guitar in the UK. When I'm not rejigging pedalboards I'm usually thinking about rejigging pedalboards.