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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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.
