It is false that the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the pharmaceutical AstraZeneca was ready since 2018, as affirmed by messages on social networks next to the manipulated image that shows that date in one of the boxes of medicines manufactured to market that drug.
Facebook and Twitter users have massively disseminated on these networks, photos of one of the die-cut and factory-printed cartons ready to be converted into boxes of ten vials of Astrazeneca’s anticovid vaccine. On one of the flaps you can read the date of July 15, 2018.
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“A photograph that indicates that the AstraZeneca vaccine was created in 2018,” says, in Spanish, one of the multiple messages in several languages shared next to the image. Another ironizes that the covid “apparently was not discovered until 2020”, the “election year” of President Donald Trump, and a user presents the photo as proof that the coronavirus “is planned.”
The authors of these publications thus defend the conspiracy theories known as “plandemic”, which attribute the global health emergency to an initiative expressly programmed with obscure ends and which follows steps established by hidden powers.
DATA: The truth is that the image has been manipulated to add the date and, in fact, it was originally published at the end of 2020, months after the pandemic broke out and when AstraZeneca was already preparing the distribution of its vaccines against covid-19.
A reverse search of the photograph leads to several tweets published in November 2020 that contain the image, but without any date or figure being printed on that flap of the box prepared to pack the vaccines.
One such publication, made by the Citizen Journalist Network, stated on November 15, 2020: “The vaccine is ready, friends, and here is a sample of the packaging waiting for the vaccine production line to go into full operation.”
It also highlights that, in the manipulated image, the typography and the concrete tone of the black color of the numbers of that supposed date does not coincide with that of the other figures printed on the box.
❌AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine was not ready almost two years before the pandemic. ????
⚠️The viral photo with the date of 2018 printed on a box made for that vaccine is a montage.
????????Here we explain it to you: https://t.co/oHBNOilcKy#VaccineCheck pic.twitter.com/6E2KYYOrzs
– EFE Verifica (@EFEVerifica) August 26, 2021
It was not the Covid virus, but the Mers virus
This is not the first time that false information has circulated about anticovid vaccines supposedly prepared in advance of the pandemic. EFE Verifica had already denied a misinformation which ensured that the Modern Pharmaceutical and the American Health Administration had prepared an anticovid drug in 2019.
Contrary to the biased interpretation that was made of an official collaboration agreement, the US Health Administration and Modern Pharma did not transfer technology to manufacture an anticovid vaccine to the University of North Carolina before this disease was known Rather, it was a research project related to previous coronaviruses.
Anyone can consult on the internet the “confidentiality agreement” between Moderna and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that show viral websites as alleged evidence of a conspiracy, because it is part of a 153-page document published in a “cloud” on June 2, 2020 by journalist Bob Herman of the American news website Axios.
But this agreement has nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2 and, as sources from the US National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) explained to EFE, it referred to a vaccine against it. MERS-CoV, virus responsible for the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) detected in 2012 in Saudi Arabia, which affected 2,500 people and caused 858 deaths in different countries.
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