Covid-19 vaccine causes monkeypox: will this be the next hoax?

“The monkeypox it is caused by the anti vaccine COVID-19“. Overnight blogs, sites and forums could be filled with thousands of news items and followers of theories like this one. The deployment of parties is already underway on the social networks; there is who denies smallpoxwho blames vaccines, who prefers to focus on other problems: “Monkeypox does not exist, it is an adverse reaction to the vaccine“; “It’s just Herpes, and the vaccine is to blame” and so on.

A biologist knows that these statements are not true, for a series of reasons that appear clear to a professional in the sector; but someone else, not knowing the composition of the vaccine and the nature of the smallpox virus, might think otherwise.

But how does the correlation between the Covid-19 vaccine and monkeypox arise? The current pandemic provides an excellent starting point for the development of new hoaxes. The fake news on Covid-19 vaccines have spread widely from 2020 onwards; despite the efforts of official bodies to disseminate explanatory articles, there are still many who are not correctly informed: there are probably still those who believe that the Covid-19 pandemic has been spread by 5G network.

Given these premises, it is easier to connect the new disease to an already consolidated “enemy”, the vaccine, rather than to create a new one. To bring the buffalo to the Next Levelthat is to say switch from “side effect” to “vaccine-induced disease”, the step is short. The biggest risk is a possible semantic association of two terms which, in reality, have nothing to do with each other: monkeypox and chimpanzee adenovirus.

The semantic misunderstanding

The premise is that AstraZeneca uses a particular vector in the Covid-19 vaccine: ChAdOx1, Oxford chimpanzee adenovirus 1.

Scientific information readily available, but of not very easy interpretation. Let’s analyze the fact from a scientific point of view: adenoviruses are a rather large family of DNA viruses; infect animals and humans, usually without severe symptoms. They stand out for their appearance conspicuously geometric, in the shape of an icosahedron. Compared to other viruses, they have the ability to infect a large number of different cells, and activate the immune system well; these characteristics have attracted the attention of researchers, because they lend themselves well to obtain effective vaccines not only against Covid-19, but potentially for several other pathogens.