“I was just about to post the same comment. VPN use is for privacy, not safety against malware.”
I think a VPN tunnel could be helpful if you are going through a lot of nodes. Such as decentralized networking?
Well,... Let's say you're at point 'A' and you need to connect to point 'E', and points 'B, 'C', and 'D' are in the path between 'A' and 'E' (a typical case on the internet):
A == B == C == D == E
If you just connect from 'A' to 'E' your packets traverse 'B', 'C', and 'D' explicitly. Programs like "traceroute" will show those intermediate points as "hops" along the path. Programs running on those hops could in theory read your packets' content, and if you're using an insecure (unencrypted) protocol like HTTP, they can see what you're doing.
If instead you use a VPN between 'A' and 'E', it APPEARS that your packets are going directly from 'A' to 'E', but in fact they're still going through all the same intermediate hops 'B', 'C', and 'D'. But they're encrypted by the VPN tunnel so they're not readable in the intermediate hops.
Does that mean you're any safer? Yeah, in the sense that a Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack is harder. So that's something.