Social media reports have made the false claim that the coronavirus was created ‘for the vaccine’, rather than the other way around.
Examples can be seen (here, here, here, here).
“The vaccine was not brought to Covid … Covid was brought in for the vaccine”, the reports read. “Once you realize that, everything else will make sense.”
But there is no evidence that the coronavirus was created, or deliberately spread, as a pick that leads to widespread vaccination.
The outbreak of the coronavirus started with a group of pneumonia cases of unknown origin in Wuhan, China, which was reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) by the Chinese Health Authority on December 31, 2019 (here).
As the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explains, many of the early patients had ties to a seafood and live animal market where one could contract the virus from an animal (here). After this, the virus can spread from person to person.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2 (here).
Many different countries have independently proven that SARS-CoV-2 exists, and the genetic sequences for different strains of the virus are readily available online (here).
These series contain instructions for the production of proteins from the virus, which form the basis for the vaccines Pfizer-BioNTech, Oxford-AstraZeneca and Moderna.
Eventually, the vaccines were designed to save lives by giving people immunity to the disease.
To date, there have been more than 114 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, resulting in more than 2.5 million deaths worldwide (covid19.who.int/).
VERDICT
Untrue. The coronavirus vaccine was created in response to the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.