Experts dismiss 'impossible' claim that vaccines cause mpox infections

"Mr. Guo Wengui says: #mpox is a complication of the vaccine!!" reads a tweet shared on June 27.

The post features a 36-second extract from a livestream podcast of Guo published on June 10, 2022.

"We had the mpox vaccine before mpox was discovered," he says in the podcast. "Mpox is a complication of the vaccine."

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Screenshot of the false post, taken on July 6, 2023.

The post surfaced online after the World Health Organization announced the global mpox outbreak that started in May 2022 was no longer a "public health emergency of international concern" (archived link).

Over 88,200 people were infected with the virus in the outbreak and 149 people died (archived link).

Guo's video was also shared on various social media platforms including Twitter, Gettr, Tiktok and Reddit, accumulating hundreds of shares.

The tycoon -- a cult-like figure wanted in China who was recently arrested in the United States for alleged fraud -- has previously shared Covid vaccine misinformation.

While the posts do not specify which purported vaccine they allege causes mpox, no existing jab can make people sick with the disease, multiple scientists say.

'Not possible'

"There are currently no licensed vaccines that contain mpox, so it is not possible for a vaccine to cause mpox," Kari Debbink, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told AFP on July 3.

"There is no possibility that the use of the vaccine could provoke or trigger the onset of mpox disease," William Schaffner, a professor at the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Centre, separately told AFP on July 4.

"In fact, mpox's rise is related to the cessation of routine smallpox vaccination which was protective against mpox as well," Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told AFP on July 4.

The virus that causes mpox is from the same family of viruses as the one that causes the deadlier smallpox disease. A global vaccination campaign has led to the eradication of smallpox by 1980.

Mpox outbreaks

Moreover, experts say evidence from mpox outbreaks show the disease transmits to humans from infected animals or is passed from human to human through close physical contact (archived link).

Countries in Central and West Africa have suffered local mpox outbreaks for decades and infections from outside these areas were mostly related to international travel, according to the WHO (archived link).

"Basically, we see mpox first in a returning traveller, then later we'll start seeing mpox in the country (or countries) to which the traveller returned," Stephen Morse, Director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University, told AFP on July 5.

"This may then snowball as more people become infected and infect others through contact. This suggests mpox came first, not a 'vaccine complication.'"

In May 2022 mpox cases started emerging in Europe, North America then elsewhere, mostly among men who have sex with men (MSM).

Guidance from the European Medicines Agency, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other global health agencies recommend vaccination for MSM and other high-risk individuals to protect against mpox (archived links here and here).