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
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.