evidence: Incorrect: The increase in reported leprosy cases started before COVID-19 vaccines became available to the public. Thus, vaccination couldn’t have caused them. Inadequate support: Studies reporting a leprosy reaction in people recently vaccinated against COVID-19 don’t show that vaccines cause leprosy. In fact, leprosy reactions are inflammatory reactions occurring among people who were already infected with leprosy-causing bacteria before being vaccinated. A reel posted on Instagram in early January 2024 claimed that COVID-19 vaccines caused leprosy. The video mentioned a surge in leprosy cases in the U.S., where "none of the traditional risk factors are being found" and that medical journals had been establishing a correlation between COVID-19 vaccines and the surge in leprosy cases. The reel was viewed more than 30,000 times. [...] However, these reports don’t imply that the vaccine caused leprosy. Instead, the immune response to vaccination might increase the likelihood of leprosy reactions, which are inflammatory reactions in people already infected with M. leprae. Indeed, vaccination and infections caused by other pathogens have been identified before as possible risk factors for developing leprosy reactions[6,7]. Therefore, COVID-19 vaccines don’t cause leprosy; for the vaccine to trigger a leprosy reaction, the person needs to be already infected with M. leprae.