Conspiracy theorists scaremonger over self-spreading vaccines

Disinformation actors are looking for new ways to revive engagement with Covid-19 vaccine conspiracies. And they’ve hit on a new narrative to scare their followers into fresh outrage. 

“The Threat of Self-Spreading Vaccines” reads the headline of one article that is doing the rounds on social media. It claims scientists are developing a new form of vaccination that requires only a fraction to be inoculated for the vaccine to  spread through the whole population. 

Before we start debunking the actual texts of these pseudoscientific articles, let’s first examine the concept of self-spreading vaccines. It’s the idea that vaccines themselves could be as contagious as the diseases they fight. Researchers are developing self-spreading vaccines for use on wildlife, to enable the spread of the vaccine through a given animal population while only having to vaccinate about 5% of animals. But such vaccines have never been used on humans.

The research into self-spreading vaccines first emerged in the 1980s, when a small number of scientists started thinking of ways to fight viruses at the source — by stopping them spreading among animals, with a mind to stopping animals transmitting these viruses to humans.