A trending post shares a video claiming that WHO gave millions of Africans smallpox vaccines laced with HIV. The video features a real 1987 New York Times article that baselessly speculated that the smallpox vaccines “triggered the AIDS virus.”
The false claim that vaccines cause other diseases has been used for decades to argue against vaccination. Debunking messaging may explain that the theory proposed in the Times was immediately rejected by experts, who emphasized that the claim had no basis in reality. The claim also ignores the fact that mass smallpox vaccination campaigns were being carried out in other parts of the world with no similar “triggering” of HIV.
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