Is monkeypox a ‘side effect’ of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine? Korean expert slams ‘very ignorant rumour’

Epidemiologist Yoo Jin-hong said the claim ‘has no basis in fact’ and ‘appears to stem from the idea that chimpanzees are broadly referred to as monkeys’

AstraZeneca’s Covid jab uses a chimpanzee adenovirus vector – altered so it does not infect humans or replicate – to transport genetic instructions to the body

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Social media posts shared across the world have incorrectly claimed that recent monkeypox cases recorded outside of areas in western and central Africa where it is endemic are a “side effect” of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. Photo: Reuters

Published: 10:02am, 8 Jun 2022Updated: 3:37am, 15 Jun 2022

The recent emergence of hundreds of cases of monkeypox worldwide has already triggered a flood of misinformation online, much of it modelled on conspiracy theories that have been circulating since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Social media posts shared across the world have incorrectly claimed that recent monkeypox cases recorded outside of areas in western and central Africa where it is endemic are a “side effect” of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.

The claim is linked to the fact that AstraZeneca’s jab uses a chimpanzee adenovirus vector.

But health experts said that this idea “has no basis in fact”, in part because the viruses belong in different families – poxvirus for monkeypox, and adenovirus for the Covid vaccine.

The vaccine “cannot generate new viruses inside humans and cause something like monkeypox,” said Professor Eom Jung-shik, an infectious disease expert at the Gachon University Gil Medical Centre.

The adenovirus is the vaccine vector, which means it is only a vehicle to transport genetic instructions to the body to trigger the production of a spike protein similar to that of the Sars-CoV-2 virus. This then prompts an immune response so the body can fight a real infection.