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Debunked: ‘HIV-infected Green Monkey DNA’ has not been found in Covid-19 vaccines

The claim is based on a pre-print that does not mention HIV or green monkeys.

CLAIMS SUGGESTING THAT “Green Monkey DNA”, vaccines for Covid-19, and “tainted RNA” are causing HIV have spread online, despite being false.

“Scientists Warn Millions Are HIV Positive Due to ‘Tainted mRNA’ in Food Supply”, one Irish Instagram post published on 16 January read.

The post also featured a video that cites an article with the headline: “Study: HIV-Infected Green Monkey DNA Found in COVID-19 Vaccines”.

Although it is unclear from the video where that article was published, it appears to be a 2023 piece from The People’s Voice, a fringe publication that regularly spreads anti-vaccine and other health misinformation.

The article refers to a scientific pre-print about DNA contamination in Covid-19 vaccines that neither mentions HIV nor Green Monkeys — though we’ll get back to this later.

The person in the video posted to Instagram implies that ingredients in the vaccine can cause serious cancers in humans and that they can “prove that HIV was inserted into the spike protein that was injected into billions of arms around the globe”.

These claims are not entirely coherent and have no evidence to back them up.

‘HIV-infected Green Monkey DNA’

At first glance, it is hard to parse what the phrase “HIV-infected Green Monkey DNA” refers to.

Green monkeys are a real thing: namely, the species Chlorocebus sabaeus. Although their fur does have a green tinge to it, they are largely white and grey.

Despite the context of the social media claims made online, the green-tinged fur has nothing to do with disease or genetic tempering — that’s just how the monkeys look.

But what about HIV-infected DNA? HIV, or Human immunodeficiency virus, is a retrovirus, which means that it reproduces itself by creating DNA that it inserts into a cell it is infecting, changing their genetic structure and turning them into virus factories.

In other words, a HIV-infected cell in, say, a green monkey, does have different DNA than other cells in their bodies.

So, given that HIV-infected green monkey DNA is an actual thing, was this what the scientific pre-print about DNA contamination was about?

A scientific pre-print about DNA contamination in Covid-19 vaccines was posted online in April 2023 called “Sequencing of bivalent Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines reveals nanogram to microgram quantities of expression vector dsDNA per dose”.

The pre-print remains unpublished (this means it has not gone through the “peer review” process that checks it for errors).

What does this pre-print say about HIV-infected Green Monkey DNA? Nothing.

The terms “HIV”, “Human immunodeficiency virus” or “monkey” never appear in the paper.

Instead, it mentions a “72bp insertion” that is “known for its enhancement to the SV40 promoter and its nuclear targeting signal”.

This is to say that the pre-prints authors say they detected a short segment of DNA that is associated with a disease called SV40 (or simian virus 40), which is often studied in green monkey kidney cells.

SV40 has been speculated to cause tumours in humans, though evidence of this is scant and that theory remains unproven.

The pre-print paper notes that the samples the researchers tested “do not contain the entire SV40 virus or the SV40 T-antigen”.

Although it would be concerning if there were DNA contamination in vaccines at all, it is a far cry from claims of HIV-infected Green Monkey DNA. 

The DNA the authors think they detected was neither HIV, HIV-altered, nor the DNA of a Green Monkey.

(The paper which indicates that DNA contamination was found remains a pre-print and should not be interpreted as establishing a scientific finding).

Kevin McKernan, who is listed as the lead author of the study, told the AP that claims his work had shown a link between vaccines and deadly diseases to be “fear-mongering” and “click-bait.”

It’s also notable that while the claims currently spreading cite an article in The People’s Voice, that article does not cite anything for its claims about HIV DNA.

The article in The People’s Voice is titled is “Study: HIV-Infected Green Monkey DNA Found in COVID-19 Vaccines”; however, the terms “HIV” and “Human immunodeficiency virus” do not appear in the text of the story at all.

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