A top Bermudian doctor has attacked myths surrounding the coronavirus vaccine.

Malcolm Brock said: “I have an ambitious task. I really want to give you enough scientific concepts about the Covid vaccine for you to recognise the misinformation when you see it.”

Dr Brock added there said there were a variety of websites that perpetuated myths about the vaccination.

He said: “When a scientist gets up there and says something, usually this genre is designed to create scientific mistrust on questions that are impossible to answer, such as how long will immunity last.”

Dr Brock added that misconceptions about the vaccine were usually rooted in “one small kernel of truth”, but went overboard.

He said: “Wait to take the vaccine, vaccines cause infertility, Bill Gates is tracking you – all that stuff.

“Let’s just talk about waiting for the vaccine. People say, ‘I need to wait for months before I take this vaccine. Even healthcare workers are telling me this’.

“So the researchers went back and they asked themselves a very simple question.

“Of all the vaccines out there … if there were any long-term side effects that occurred, what was the longest time interval between the first vaccine dose and when the long term side-effect appeared?

“The answer was six to eight weeks. So can you get something after six to eight weeks?

“In medicine you never say never, you never say always, but I will say this – it is as rare as rocking horse manure.”

Dr Brock, appointed the EF Gordon Professor of Thoracic Surgery at the world-famous Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore last November, was speaking at the Hamilton Rotary Club’s virtual lunch on Tuesday.

He said one of “unsettling” ideas that people asked was how a traditional process to create a vaccine that usually takes 10 to 15 years happen in a year.

Dr Brock added: “The answer is the same as for most things in life – human desire especially if you incentivise this desire with $24 billion.

“The manufacturers had no risk and the Food and Drug Administration regulators were allowed to streamline all red tape.

“The FDA was allowed to review all the human trials in real time.

”There was a rolling review – as soon as those clinical trials started you can see they were rolling and reviewing, not waiting until the end.“

Dr Brock, who graduated as a doctor from Johns Hopkins in 1991 and continued his career there as a physician and professor, highlighted that 209 million people worldwide had received at least one shot of the vaccine by this week.