Fact Check: Was HIV used to manufacture the COVID-19 vaccine

Since the COVID-19 vaccine was approved for emergency use, there have been plenty of theories floating around the same

New Delhi,Feb 09: Ever since the roll out of the vaccination against COVID-19, there have been calls in various quarters to roll back the same. Conspiracy theories have been floated about how it can be life threatening.Screenshot 2023-02-09 at 7.01.59 AM.png

A social media post very dangerous in nature claims that the BBC had admitted to the use of HIV in the making of the COVID-19 vaccine.

The video features a logo of the BBC and a man can be seen explaining the structure of the vaccine. This is followed by an animated demonstration and a voice-over in which the COVID-19 spike protein action is explained. The man in the video explains how the vaccine can be manufactured using a small fragment of HIV protein.

OneIndia did a reverse image search of the keyframes of the video and it led us to several links and tweets with the same video. One such search took us to a video titled, "Horizon Special 2021 - The Vaccine."

"The extraordinary inside story of the biggest scientific challenge of our age - following a small band of vaccine scientists around the world who took on Covid-19 and ultimately delivered the weapon to beat it. As news of the coronavirus broke around the globe, a small group of scientists jumped into action to tackle one of the greatest medical challenges of our time: to create a vaccine against a virus no-one had ever seen before and to do so in record time, all during a deadly, global pandemic," read the description of the video.

We also found a report in the BBC titled 'Horizon Special: The Vaccine." The report says that this is the first documentary to showcase the behind-the-scenes to front-running vaccine research teams during 2020 and 2021. The documentary was first aired in June 2021.

The man who features in the viral video is Keith Chappel, an associate professor at the University of Queensland. The time stamp of the viral clip can be found here.

Chappel a Molecular Virologist focuses his research on vaccine development. He is also a co-leader of UQ's COVID-19 vaccine programme, which produced one of the first vaccines to enter clinical trials, six months since the pandemic hit the world. One of the co-founders of the programme was Australian biotech company Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL).

Chappel one of the inventors of the 'molecular clamp' vaccine technology says that the technology works by 'locking' viral infection proteins into a shape to trigger an optimal immune response. To ensure that the molecule stays in shape, the research team led by him introduced a small fragment of a similar protein from the HIV virus to lock onto the COVID-19 spike proteins. He however explained that by no chance would this introduce HIV into the subjects.

Since the false positives among the test subjects caused panic among the public, the Australian Department of Health and CSL halted the project. The research team announced that the trial could not enter phase two of human trials because of its interference with HIV diagnostic tests.

Hence it can be concluded that HIV was used two manufacture a vaccine, but only a small fragment of of the HIV protein was used to design the vaccine. The vaccine project was shelved immediately after the first sage of the human trial and never came out since.

More searches on the subject led us to information that reads: "The COVID-19 vaccines do not contain HIV protein. The vaccines have been developed to protect specifically against the virus by teaching the immune system to recognise and fight the spike protein found on the surface SARS-CoV2 virus. HIV is a separate virus and not related to SARS CoV2. They have been rigorously tested for safety and efficacy and have been authorised for emergency use. Any concerns should be addressed only by a healthcare provider, who can give accurate information.