A Tennessee bill doesn’t ban vaccines from being pumped into the food supply

A Tennessee bill that would designate vaccine-containing foods as drugs is being misleadingly characterized online.

"Tennessee has become the first State in America to ban Bill Gates’ toxic mRNA from being pumped into the food supply," read a screenshot of a news article posted April 6 on Facebook reads. The screenshot included a photograph of Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, signing papers. 

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Tennessee has not "banned" mRNA vaccines from food.  That’s partly because such edible vaccines — vaccines administered through foods — are not approved for use anywhere in the world, World Health Organization spokesperson Margaret Harris told PolitiFact.

The Facebook post’s screenshot is from a news article by The People’s Voice, a website that has spread misinformation before. The article refers to Tennessee House Bill 1894, which would classify vaccine-containing foods as drugs. But that bill mentions neither Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates nor anything about mRNA being banned from the food. Gates is a frequent conspiracy theory target. In 2023, we fact-checked, and rated False, a claim that Gates was poisoning produce with chemicals.

H.B. 1894 "classifies any food that contains a vaccine or vaccine material as a drug." When discussing the bill during a Tennessee Senate session, state Sen. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, said he knew of no specific examples of vaccine-containing food in Tennessee. But he said such foods are in development.

A legislative study said that if the bill became law there would be no associated costs because "there is no known test for these vaccines in food and no known lab doing this kind of analysis."

Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not authorized use of edible vaccines, researchers are developing them in genetically modified foods such as potatoes, bananas, lettuce, corn and rice. 

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Researchers have long pursued edible vaccines as a cost-effective way to distribute, store and administer vaccines. The World Health Organization found they can be "produced cheaply in very high amounts." 

Charles Arntzen, a plant molecular biologist, was the first to produce a hepatitis B vaccine in tobacco in 1990. And, in 1998, researchers supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases reported the results of the first human trials of E. coli vaccines in potatoes. 

Despite these efforts, Arntzen said in 2004 that he hasn’t found vaccine manufacturers willing to finance larger human trials of edible vaccines. Edible vaccines vary by dose, which makes it difficult for regulatory agencies to approve them.

However, scientists are revisiting edible vaccines. University of California Riverside researchers, for example, announced in 2021 that they were studying whether mRNA vaccines can be administered through edible plants, such as lettuce.

The Tennessee House and Senate both approved H.B. 1894 April 8. Lee has not yet signed it into law. In Tennessee, if a bill is not signed by the governor after 10 days, it becomes law. 

The photograph of Lee signing a bill was first posted on Lee’s Facebook account in 2021, a reverse-image search found. 

We rate the claim that Tennessee has become the first state in the U.S. to ban Bill Gates’ mRNA from being pumped into the food supply False. 

RELATED: No, mRNA vaccines aren’t widely used in livestock and can’t get into the food supply