Monkeypox is not caused by COVID-19 vaccination

^{By Liam McNally}

As health authorities around the world investigate the recent outbreak of monkeypox, social media users are spreading unfounded conspiracy theories that the disease is a side effect of COVID-19 vaccines.

Posts circulating on social media have made a number of false claims, including that monkeypox is VAIDS, or “vaccine-acquired immunodeficiency syndrome”, and is caused by COVID-19 vaccines.

Unfounded claims state that the COVID-19 vaccines suppress immunity, with one Facebook user describing it as: “A vaccine that has weakened the immunity of billions of people.” Another user claimed: “The vaccinated have VAIDS and this [monkeypox] is just the first symptom to show.”

According to experts consulted by RMIT FactLab, there is no such thing as “vaccine-acquired immunodeficiency syndrome”, or VAIDS, and there is no causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and AIDS, let alone monkeypox.

The monkeypox virus is related to smallpox and was first discovered in a monkey in 1958, with the first human diagnosed in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The virus is not related to COVID-19 vaccines, which were made widely available in 2021 after being created in 2020 in response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019.

Cases of monkeypox virus have been on the rise in recent months, with the World Health Organization reporting 780 cases outside of countries where the illness is endemic between  May 13 and June 2, 2022.

Dr Joshua Szanyi, Public Health Medicine Registrar at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, told RMIT FactLab that “there is no such thing as ‘vaccine acquired immune deficiency syndrome’, and vaccines do not cause immune deficiencies”.

“There is no basis at all to any claims that the monkeypox outbreak is in any way related to COVID-19 vaccination,” he said.

Epidemiologist Professor Catherine Bennett, of the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University, told FactLab that: “There is no evidence that frequent boosters could have a negative impact on the immune response to COVID-19, let alone other infectious diseases.

“Monkeypox is a known virus that is spreading in ways that are consistent with previous understanding of transmission, only through close contact,” she said.

Current reports of monkeypox show that it is largely found in the gay and bisexual male community, she said.

“If there was anything insidious going [on] linked to population immunity following vaccination, we would not expect to see it impacting one particular demographic as we are seeing here,” she said.

Since monkeypox was first diagnosed in humans, cases have slowly risen in Central and West Africa, where two strains of the virus are classified as endemic. 

There have also been outbreaks in non-endemic countries over the years, including 47 cases in the US in 2003, and one to two cases in the UK, Israel, and Singapore in 2018 and 2019. 

The May outbreak in non-endemic countries includes 207 cases in the UK, 156 in Spain, 138 in Portugal, 58 in Canada, 19 in the US, and 3 in Australia.

A WHO report on monkeypox says that it is spread “by close contact with lesions, body fluids, respiratory droplets and contaminated materials such as bedding”.

It says the illness is usually “self-limiting”, however the detection of cases with no direct travel links to an endemic area is “atypical” and there is likely to be “little immunity” in populations the virus has not previously been identified in.