Posts falsely link mpox with Covid vaccines
- Published on August 23, 2024 at 09:48
- 3 min read
- By Celine SEO, AFP Hong Kong
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“German respiratory physician Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg states: monkeypox is one of the most common side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine,” read part of the Japanese caption of the X post shared on August 17.
The post -- viewed hundreds of thousands of times -- shows an interview with Wodarg, a German doctor and former politician known for his anti-vaccine views, broadcast by the controversial Austrian TV channel AUF1.
The claim surfaced online after the World Health Organization announced on August 14 that the mpox outbreak spreading across several African countries was a public health emergency of international concern (archived link).
Between January 2022 and June 2024, 208 deaths and more than 99,000 mpox cases were recorded across 116 countries, according to the WHO.
Similar posts spread online in Chinese, Spanish, French, and German.
No relationship
The virus formerly called monkeypox was discovered in 1958 in Denmark, in monkeys kept for research.
It was first discovered in humans in 1970 in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mpox is caused by a virus transmitted to humans by infected animals, but it can also be passed from human to human through close physical contact.
The disease causes fever, muscular aches and large boil-like skin lesions (archived link).
Yuen Kwok-Yung, a specialist in infectious diseases and microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong's Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, said that the claim about mpox circulating online was false.
“Coivd-19 vaccination does not cause or predispose a person to mpox which is often acquired by intimate contact with patients suffering from mpox,” he told AFP by email on August 21, 2024.
Mpox is much less contagious than Covid-19, according to the WHO (archived link).
AFP has previously debunked misinformation claiming that mpox was a side effect of the Covid-19 vaccines.
"There is no reason to say that the monkeypox epidemic is linked to the vaccine," David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told AFP in June 2022 (archived link).
False connection
The footage shown in the posts was broadcast on June 28, 2022 by AUF1, an Austrian far-right channel known for promoting conspiracy theories and misinformation (archived links here and here).
In the video, he says mpox symptoms are the same as those of shingles and that the pharmaceutical industry is only trying to scare people, using the side effects of the coronavirus, according to him, to create new businesses.
He also falsely suggests that mpox tests can produce false positive results in individuals with Herpes Zoster, which is known as shingles.
Wodarg does not provide any evidence in the video to support his claims.
The WHO website states that "identifying mpox can be difficult as other infections and conditions can look similar," including herpes (archived link).
Yuen also told AFP that a “PCR test for mpox is very specific and should not have any false positive if properly done.”
The footage of Wodarg was taken from a 45-minute interview in which he discussed how mpox could be related to the side effects of the Covid-19 vaccine, according to the programme's description (archived link).
AFP has previously debunked claims regarding Covid-19 vaccinations by Wodarg here, here and here.
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