False: COVID-19 vaccines are creating more coronavirus variants.

Virus mutations occur independently of vaccination. Vaccines play a significant role in suppressing variants.The French virologist Luc Montagnier has said in an interview that COVID-19 doesn’t die after coming in contact with vaccines. Instead, he says, the vaccine mutates and creates more variants. There is nothing to support this. According to the Associated Press (AP), vaccine experts have acknowledged that coronavirus variants began emerging “long before vaccines were widely available.” The report adds that new variants evolved due to “prolonged viral infections in the population, not vaccines,” which avoid such infections. “If the virus can’t spread, it doesn’t have an opportunity to evolve,” Dr. Stuart Ray, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s medical school told AP. According to Peter Stoilov, an associate professor of biochemistry, Montagnier’s view is based on a theory that “mutations can change epitopes that the immune system has learned from the vaccination,” which would give an advantage to the virus and help create more dangerous variants. However, Stoilov explains that “Mutations and variants occur randomly and independently of vaccination or any other selection process. In fact, they may precede selection by years or millennia." Moreover, according to AP, experts conducted trials specifically to look for signs of antibody-dependent enhancement during COVID-19 vaccine development, and they did not find any evidence of it. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), all COVID-19 vaccines approved for emergency use reduce the risk of the virus and its complications. These vaccines have proven to be effective against COVID-19 in clinical trial settings, and the studies that have looked at how COVID-19 vaccines work in real-world conditions have shown that these vaccines are working well. The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a lot of potentially dangerous misinformation. For reliable advice on COVID-19, including symptoms, prevention, and available treatment, please refer to the World Health Organization or your national healthcare authority.