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Fact check: Baseless conspiracy theory about monkeypox, Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and ‘Great Reset’

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The claim: Monkeypox is only circulating in countries where the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is being distributed and is used to advance the Great Reset

In June 2020, as countries were reeling from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Economic Forum introduced an initiative called the “Great Reset”: a range of policy ideas designed to make sure response efforts benefitted everyone, especially those living in extreme poverty.

Since then, conspiracy theories have falsely branded the Great Reset as a strategic plan by global elites to control the world.

A United Kingdom-based website that contains  inaccurate content about COVID-19 vaccines, The Expose, published an article that spreads more falsehoods about the Great Reset. The July 24 article, which was shared on Facebook, links the Great Reset to the recent monkeypox outbreak and claims the virus is spreading only in areas where Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine has been administered.

Its headline reads, “‘Monkeypox’ is only circulating in countries where the Pfizer Vaccine has been distributed & is being used to advance a Technocratic Great Reset.”

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The Facebook post with the article was shared in a group with 4,500 members. Similar posts with the article were shared in Facebook groups that have hundreds of members.

But the claim is baseless.

Infectious disease specialists told USA TODAY that monkeypox is not linked to the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, and monkeypox has infected people in countries where the Pfizer vaccine has not been distributed. The claim also promotes another Great Reset conspiracy theory; USA TODAY and other news outlets have previously debunked baseless assertions about the Great Reset.

USA TODAY reached out to The Expose and the social media users who shared the claim for comment.

Shots of Pfizer-BioNTech’s new COVID-19 booster, which updates the original vaccine to also target the BA.4 and BA.5 variants.

Monkeypox, Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine have no link

There is no link between the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and monkeypox infections. 

As infectious disease specialists have told USA TODAY, COVID-19 vaccines do not contain any live viruses, and they do not contain monkeypox virus DNA. Monkeypox cannot be a side effect of the COVID-19 vaccine, and it cannot be contracted through the vaccine.

Monkeypox is caused by infection from the monkeypox virus which comes from the Orthopoxvirus genus, according to the World Health Organization.

Fact check: Monkeypox is not a side effect of the COVID-19 vaccine, experts say

Pfizer has distributed its COVID-19 vaccine to 180 countries, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see an overlap with monkeypox in those countries, Dr. Patrick Jackson, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Virginia, told USA TODAY in an email.

At the same time, monkeypox has spread in countries where the Pfizer vaccine has not been distributed. For example, India has seen 10 monkeypox cases as of Aug. 25, but it has not authorized the Pfizer vaccine, Jackson said. Likewise, Venezuela has seen three cases of the monkeypox virus as of Sept. 13, according to the latest data from the CDC. But neither country has had any Pfizer shipments, as PolitiFact noted.

Monkeypox not part of the Great Reset 

There is no evidence that monkeypox has any connection to the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset proposals. Di Dai, a spokesperson for the organization, told USA TODAY in an email that the two have nothing to do with each other.

The World Economic Forum introduced the Great Reset in 2020 to influence policymakers as they developed recovery responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fact check:2030 diet graphic is satire, not created by World Economic Forum

But since its introduction, it has been at the center of various conspiracy theories, as BBC News reported. 

Experts told BBC News that the narratives involving the Great Reset are not new and that “similar ideas about the emergence of a totalitarian world government have been circulating since the 1960s under the umbrella term New World Order.”

USA TODAY has previously debunked false claims involving the Great Reset, including baseless assertions that Ukraine announced it was implementing the Great Reset through a mobile app and that there were calls for internet reform as part of the Great Reset.

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that monkeypox is only circulating in countries where the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is being distributed and is used to advance the Great Reset. Infectious disease specialists said that monkeypox is not linked to the Pfizer vaccine. Also, monkeypox infections have been reported in countries where the Pfizer vaccine has not been distributed. The claim promotes another baseless Great Reset conspiracy theory.

Our fact-check sources:

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Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

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This article has been archived for your research. The original version from USA TODAY can be found here.

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