Jan 12, 2021 – There is no evidence that the new vaccines for COVID-19 will cause infertility. However, this is a concern that has been cited by some health care workers as a reason for not being the first to get the shots.
Numerous health workers across the country have refused to receive the new vaccines.
Ohio governor Mike DeWine said in a recent briefing that 60% of Ohio nursing home workers turned down their shots. In Georgia, an infection prevention nurse who coordinates COVID vaccines for her health system’s 30,000 workers said less than 33% had gotten the shot so far. The rest had decided to “wait and see”. The nurse released the numbers on condition that we wouldn’t reveal which hospital she worked for as she didn’t have the authority to speak to reporters.
None of this came as a surprise to Jill Foster, MD, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who studied vaccine reluctance.
“With COVID it was the perfect storm. With COVID, there were already a lot of people saying there is no COVID, it’s no worse than the flu, “she says. Many of these people have built a lot of prominence on social media. When the vaccines came, they used these platforms to propose conspiracy theories.
My hospital asked me if they could post my photo on social media to encourage pregnant women to get vaccinated. The Facebook post has hundreds of comments, most of which “pray for this unborn child,” condemn my decision to get vaccinated, and call me a nurse. 🤦🏻♀️
– Julia, THU (@ JuliaNEM33) January 9, 2021
Where did this infertility myth come from?
In early December, a German doctor and epidemiologist named Wolfgang Wodarg, who was skeptical of the need for vaccines in other pandemics, teamed up with a former Pfizer employee to recruit the European Medicines Agency (the European Union’s counterpart to the FDA) Delay in asking the study and approval of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. One of their concerns was a protein called syncytin-1, which shares similar genetic instructions with part of the top of the new coronavirus. The same protein is an important part of the placenta in mammals. If the vaccine causes the body to make antibodies against syncytin-1, it could also cause the body to attack and reject the protein in the human placenta, making women sterile.
Her petition has been picked up on anti-vaccination blogs and websites and posted on social media. Facebook eventually removed posts about the petition from its website to spread misinformation.
The idea that vaccines could be used to control population was also tied into the plot of a recent fictional mini-series on Amazon Prime Video called Utopia. On this show – spoiler alert – a population control-obsessed drug maker creates the illusion of a pandemic flu to convince people to take its vaccine, which doesn’t prevent infection, it prevents human reproduction.
A spokesman for Amazon Studios says the series is pure fiction.
“Utopia premiered on Amazon Prime Video on September 25, 2020,” the spokesman said in a statement to WebMD. “It was written 7 years ago and filmed before the COVID-19 pandemic. The series is based on the original UK version, which premiered in 2013, and shares much of the same plot, including the vaccine storyline. “
Could something like this happen in real life while the show is creative?
The biological basis for this idea is really shaky, says Foster.
The coronavirus spike protein and syncytin-1 share small sections of the same genetic code, but not enough to bring them together. She says it would be like two people having phone numbers that both contain the number 7. You couldn’t dial a number to reach the other person even though their phone numbers have one digit in common.
“What we do know is that they are similar on such a tiny level,” says Foster.
Even Wodarg writes in his petition: “There is no indication whether antibodies against spike proteins of SARS viruses would also act like anti-syncytin-1 antibodies.”
In fact, data from human studies of the Pfizer vaccine do not support this theory. In the Pfizer study, which more than 37,000 people enrolled, women were given pregnancy tests before entering the study. They were excluded if they were already pregnant. 23 women were conceived during the trial, likely accidentally. Twelve of these pregnancies occurred in the vaccine group and eleven in the placebo group. They continued to be followed up as part of the study.
Paul Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, says this idea really crumbles when you consider that more than 22 million people in the US are living with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, were infected -19. In fact, experts believe the number is much higher because 22 million is just the number that has been tested and found. Most think that the real number is at least three times that.
Offit estimates 70 million Americans have been infected, or about 20% of the population. If the infertility theory were true, one would expect the body that makes antibodies against the natural infection to show up in our fertility statistics. It has not.
“There is no evidence that this pandemic has changed fertility patterns,” Offit says.
He says there are cases where vaccines have caused biological effects linked to a disease. Take measles, for example. After a measles vaccine, small broken blood vessels called petechiae may appear due to a problem with blood clotting. It’s rare, but it can happen. The vaccine causes this phenomenon, he says, because measles, the disease, can cause it too.
“If a natural infection doesn’t change fertility, why should a vaccine?” says Offit, who, as an advisor to the FDA, reviewed clinical trials behind the vaccines.
Offit admits that we don’t have all of the long-term safety data we would like for the vaccines. This is being furiously gathered as the vaccines are being distributed to millions of people and reported by the CDC.
So far, he says, the main problem seems to be a severe allergic reaction, which occurs very rarely – at around 11 people per million doses given. When it is supposed to happen, people generally know immediately when they are still being watched by nurses and doctors. Offit says the reaction, while serious, is treatable. This is one reason why the CDC has advised people who have allergies to any part of the vaccine, including PEG or a related compound called polysorbate, to avoid those first few shots.
Bell’s palsy, which causes one side of a person’s face to temporarily fall off, may be another rare risk. In clinical trials, this transient paralysis was slightly more common in vaccinated people than in people who received the placebo, although cases of Bell’s palsy were not more common than you would expect in the general population. It is currently unclear whether this is a side effect of the vaccines.
Offit says what people should know is that they could feel pretty crappy after their shots. He says he had fatigue and a fever for about 12 hours after his last vaccination. This is not a side effect, but the body creates a protective shield against the virus.
“It was a success,” he says, “but here too a small price to pay to avoid this virus.”
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Jill Foster, MD, pediatric infectious disease specialist, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Paul Offit, MD, director, Vaccination Education Center, Philadelphia Children’s Hospital.
Wodarg, petition to the European Medicines Agency, December 1, 2020.
Pfizer-BioNTech Briefing Document to the FDA, December 10, 2020.
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