As a general rule of life , try not to get your cutting - edge medical research news show from memes posted by some guy called @tinfoil_bob_420 . It will probably terminate badly .
For representative , you might end up thinking that the recent find of anew and more virulent strain of HIVin the Netherlands was connected in some way to the rural area ’s high COVID vaccination charge per unit . That ’s the latest installment in along , longsighted , longlist of COVID misinformation , and it ’s been graze up all over societal medium .
“ extolment , you VAIDS’ed yourself , ” reads oneFacebook meme – the punchline being an seemingly humourous portmanteau of “ vaccine ” and “ AIDS ” .
“ I wo n’t need an HIV test , because I have n’t had a COVID jab , ” writesone Twitter drug user , possibly assome kind of warningagainst sleeping with him .
And : “ What will you do when it is find out that HIV is in the vaccinum via Spike protein ? ” asksanother , referencing a vaccine candidate that was only available in Australia , did n’t run any risk of infect the great unwashed with HIV , and wasscrapped over a class ago .
“ New HIV strain found in the Netherlands : Highly infective form makes people inauspicious twice as nimble , ” they keep on . “ There are no coincidences ! ”
Here ’s the matter : not only docoincidences happen all the time , but this scantily even depend as one . As Dr Chris Wymant , lead generator of the newspaper in which thenew “ VB ” variate of HIVwas identified , explicate to IFLScience the new strain has probably been around for decades already . “ The evolution that resulted in the VB variant took place during the late 1980s and nineties in the Netherlands . It distribute more cursorily than other HIV variants during the 2000s , but its banquet has been decline since around 2010 , ” he say .
Senior author of the study , Professor Christophe Fraser , toldReutersthis makes the timing of the two events less “ suspicious ” and more “ literally proof of no connectedness . ”
“ There is perfectly no basis to the claim of an association between COVID , or COVID vaccination , and the severity of contagion in those infect with the VB version of HIV , ” Fraser said . “ Such an tie is strictly impossible due to the timing of when the information were pull in and analyses , and when the affected role were infected . ”
Most of the cases analyzed in the report were diagnose more than a decade ago , Fraser indicate out , with the bailiwick itself take down that “ [ m]ost of the evolution that gave advance to the VB random variable pass before 1992 , before effective combination treatment was useable . ” As you could suppose , that make the chance that it was triggered by a COVID vaccine administrate 30 old age afterwards pretty grim .
Nevertheless , this is n’t the only rumor floating around out there that tries to link the COVID vaccines with HIV or AIDS . As we ’ve already seen , some quote a 2020 Australian vaccine nominee that carry tiny fragments of a protein discover in the HIV virus as proof that “ the vaccine causes HIV . ” It does n’t : the protein was there to stabilize COVID ’s theme song spike protein , but it did n’t and could n’t cause HIV .
Besides , that vaccine never made it to marketplace – when it was discover to cause false positive degree in HIV tests , it was defer . Australia already had access code to other vaccinum by that full point , and the government decide one novel nominee was n’t worth the impact on the country ’s established HIV substructure .
“ There is no opening the vaccine causes infection , and routine follow up examination confirmed there is no HIV computer virus present tense , ” confirmed astatementfrom the University of Queensland at the time . “ It is loosely agreed that substantial changes would need to be made to well - prove HIV testing procedures in the healthcare set to accommodate rollout of this vaccinum . Therefore … vaccinum maturation will not proceed . ”
Another “ theory ” has the recent virologist Dr Luc Montagnier , who won the Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering HIV , claim that COVID recall dose can give you either HIV or AIDS .
“ For those of you that have look at the third dosage , go and take a test for AIDS , ” various societal media accounts quote him as saying . “ The result may surprise you . Then process your politics . ”
There’sno evidenceMontagnier ever articulate this – and there ’s no way it ’s lawful even if he had : there is “ no plausible mechanism in which COVID-19 vaccinum ( or indeed , any vaccinum ) can induce HIV or AIDS , ” Dr Bnar Talabani toldReuters .
“ There is no grounds to support this title , ” Talabani add together . “ [ It ] ’s a very good example of how misinformation is constructed to toy on concern and dissuade people from let vaccinum that have been prove safe in almost 10 billion doses given worldwide , to escort . ”