A misleading statement. The BBC did not acknowledge that “HIV is used to make the Covid vaccine”, unlike
what is claimed in a tweet published on February 8 and relayed more than 1,800 times. A screenshot of the tweet is also circulating on Facebook.
This tweet is accompanied by a short video, 30 seconds long, in English. The excerpt begins with an interview with a man, who explains “it keeps it together and allows it to stay 100% in this structure present on the surface of the virus”. A female voiceover then explains a scientific process: “The form of the coronavirus Spike protein before the virus encounters our cells is what triggers the most protective antibody response. That’s why Keith has to make the Spike protein in the lab, locking it in the exact same shape, adding another protein that acts a bit like a clamp. And this protein is a tiny fragment of HIV. »
FAKE OFF
It should be remembered that “all Covid-19 vaccines approved and available worldwide use different manufacturing methods, none of which includes sequences or materials derived from HIV”, reminds 20 Minutes Keith Chappell, the Australian scientist visible in this video.
So what do we see in this extract? It comes from a BBC documentary, titled Horizon : The Vaccine, which aired in June 2021. The teams of this documentary followed for several months teams around the world who were looking for vaccines against Covid-19. Among these teams, Australian scientists from the University of Queensland. The man interviewed in the documentary is Keith Chappell, an associate professor at the university and a molecular virologist who specializes in researching new vaccines.
With his team, he sought in 2020 to develop a vaccine against Covid-19. These scientists sought to stabilize a highly purified version of the Spike protein of the coronavirus by adding two short sequences from an HIV protein, glycoprotein 41. Why this choice? “This more stable presentation is more likely to lead to a protective immune response,” detailed on The Conversation Adam Taylor, research fellow at Australia’s Griffith University. This technology “cannot cause HIV infection,” he adds. Neither the HIV virus nor the coronavirus were present in this vaccine candidate, specifies Keith Chappell.
“There is no possibility that the vaccine will cause an infection [au VIH] »
After animal trials, phase one trials began on a group of volunteers in July 2020. All participants “were informed of the details of the vaccine, including that it contained peptide sequences corresponding to regions of the gp41 protein of HIV,” recalls Keith Chappell. The trial was peer reviewed and published in the prestigious scientific journal Lancet Infectious Diseases (Infectious diseases in French).
In December, the university announced that the research team was not going to continue research for this vaccine candidate, due to false positive HIV detected in participants. “There is no possibility that the vaccine will cause an infection, and routine follow-up tests have confirmed the absence of the HIV virus” in these participants, then wanted to reassure the university.
How could these false positives have happened, when the participants were not infected with the virus? Using certain regions of this HIV protein, “there has always been a theoretical possibility that once injected as part of the vaccine formulation, people’s immune systems will recognize it as ‘foreign’ and produce antibodies against it. », Develops Adam Taylor.
Research has been stopped
It was then decided to stop research, the risk being, if the vaccine were developed on a larger scale in this form, that some people would be falsely detected positive for HIV, when they would not be carriers of the virus. “It was considered that any interference with HIV testing could contribute to vaccine hesitancy and, at the time of the decision, it was clear that other very effective vaccines had been developed.” recalls Keith Chappell.
The European Medicines Agency validated the vaccine developed by the Pfizer/BioNTech alliance on December 21, and, nine days later, the AstraZeneca vaccine was approved in the United Kingdom. Five vaccines (those from Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax) have so far received the green light from the Haute Autorité de santé in France.
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