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As someone who was trying to conceive while the vaccine rolled out, this isn’t surprising. People were regularly reporting basal temperature spikes, delayed ovu

As someone who was trying to conceive while the vaccine rolled out, this isn’t surprising. People were regularly reporting basal temperature spikes, delayed ovulation, and delayed periods. This is a community that is extremely data-oriented, since with the right measurements you’re able to predict your fertile (or non-fertile) window. I was disappointed to see how little research there was into menstruation at the time. We were told that the vaccine was perfectly safe, and even questioning the vaccine made you ‘anti-vax.’ Now over a full year later the scientific community is confirming what random message boards have been saying all along. It may be safe, but nobody really cared to look at the impact on menstruation or pregnancy beyond confirming that the rate of miscarriage is unchanged.

pygy_ 4y ago
Animals studies (made IIRC by Pfizer or BioNTech, and using GFAP mRNA, not the spike protein) had shown that while most lipid nanoparticles stay at the injection sites, (quoting from memory) ~10-20% end up in the blood stream, then enter myocardial, hepatic, adrenal and gonadic tissues. In other words, organs that consume a large amount of cholesterol. My informed guess would be that the nanoparticles combine with HDL/LDL in the blood stream, and end up in the cells that consume these, but this is speculation. This would end up disrupting the ovarian endocrine cells (cholesterol is the chemical precursor of sex hormones), which can regenerate once the RNA and its product has been eliminated. The future egg cells should not be affected (and AFAIK the ovarian reserve is not damaged by the COVID vaccines), and neither is sperm production.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
skuhn 4y ago
This study began in April 2021 and the paper was published in July 2022. Presuming that the amount of time spent was necessary to thoroughly gather, review and document the findings, what would you have wanted done differently?
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Perhaps we wouldn't have had the news, pretending that there was no effect, and if there was, correlation is not causation, and then saying as little as 5 months ago that there may be an effect but that any effects on menstruation only lasted one day at the most [1]. Just be honest - dishonesty like this breeds anti-vaxxers. [1] https://youtu.be/TWk2Z6mzZUU?t=60 https://youtu.be/TWk2Z6mzZUU?t=60 (Good Morning America and ABC News talking about menstruation side effects 5 months ago and basically saying the opposite of this study)
- PKop 4y ago
  Not taken the vax if your health and age profile didn't merit it, given the unknown unknowns and lack of long term testing, which many people highlighted endlessly for the past year or so. Public concessions exactly to your point that long term testing takes time, and assertions to the contrary that tere are no risks of x, y, z were blatant sophistry intended to silence legitimate criticism. These vaccines were mandated at threat of loss of careers for crying out loud...people are still getting fired for not taking them long after covid is any sort threat whatsoever or where there can be plausible deniability about claims the vaccines actually prevent contracting covid etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004097 (lot of "trust the experts", "you sound like one of the ignorant rubes" type of replies at those links, devoid of any sort of critical thinking, blindly trusting authorities without any acknowledgement to potential downsides outweighing limited upside of vax for many cohorts)
  - shitpostbot 4y ago
  - OrangeMonkey 4y ago
    I work in healthcare and life sciences, I am vaxed, and I can say I fully believe you are correct. I have to attest and show my vax cards to keep my job or get a new one and - of all things - we had to show vax cards to go to a behind the scene animal encounter at a zoo. Does the vaccinne stop us from catching it or from giving it to others? There is no evidence, yet, that it does. Am I having to weasel word my post here in the concern that my account will be banned from hacker news even though this is literally what I do for a living? Yes. Yes I am.
slg 4y ago
This lack of foresight is not something specific to this vaccine. It is the male bias ingrained in most western medicine. Due to fear of how experimental medicines will impact fertility and pregnancy, males are usually overrepresented in clinical trials which makes female specific side effects much harder to detect.
- jelliclesfarm 4y ago
  I agree. This is something that needs discussion.
- brightball 4y ago
  I'd accept the male bias approach for almost anything except the Covid vax. There was a huge segment of society angrily screaming at everyone that everything was perfectly safe, if you didn't take it you were anti-vax and wanted to kill grandma. It was absolutely insanity on every social media channel. I'm sure some nuanced bits were lost in the noise, but it was virtually impossible to openly discuss even hesitation to vaccinate, much less complications. We've heard from 2 local people in our small community who had family members die within 24 hours of vaccination. They were afraid to talk about it because of the blow back that came from anyone mentioning complications. A scary side of a lot of people came out and it's permanently affected my perception of a great many. Maybe there was a male bias in the clinical trials, but I have a hard time believing any information about complications would have been released or accepted at that time.
  - slg 4y ago
    > There was a huge segment of society angrily screaming at everyone that everything was perfectly safe, if you didn't take it you were anti-vax and wanted to kill grandma. It was absolutely insanity on every social media channel. I'm sure some nuanced bits were lost in the noise, but it was virtually impossible to openly discuss even hesitation to vaccinate, much less complications. Except when it came to people who were pregnant or hoping to get pregnant. There was relatively open discussion of the potential health impacts in those situations because those were not well understood due to the previously mentioned bias. The general consensus at the time was to get the vaccine, because the thought was that any side effects would be less severe than potentially getting Covid without that extra protection. But those recommendations usually came with a lot more “discuss it with your doctor” disclaimers than the overall “just get it” recommendations for the rest of the population who wasn’t thinking about pregnancies. That slight reservation shows that it wasn’t just a huge coverup to get people vaxxed. It was a genuine lack of knowledge because of how these medicines are almost always tested.
greenthrow 4y ago
Quick Googling shows that the cold and flu can impact ovulation. So it is not a surprise that Covid or its vaccines can as well, since it often presents as more severe. It was still the correct choice of action for you to get the vaccine and potentially delay conception. It is safer for you and the baby if you are vaccinated. This study is just providing confirmation to something that all medical professionals likely assumed is true, based on the common knowledge that the flu and cold and other illnesses can also affect fertility.
- junofan 4y ago
  > correct choice of action Correct? To… delay conception? According to… you? I am not comfortable leaving decisions like that to others.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    There’s an argument for forcing this decision if it affects others. The prevailing theory, at least at the time, was that widespread vaccination would reduce spread and protect everyone including the unvaccinated. In that case, it could make sense to force people to delay if it means everyone ends up better off overall.
    - OrangeMonkey 4y ago
      My wife and I are at the end of our child-capable years. A delay, even of a year or two, is likely to leave us without. I know you didn't mean this the way it sounded. I know you are probably well educated and think your choices are obvious. I will only state that I have very strong feelings towards someone who tries to force a decision like this on someone else.
      - greenthrow 4y ago
        We are not talking about a delay of a year or two.
airza 4y ago
The problem is that most vaccines affect menstruation; for obvious reasons the uterus is a hotbed of immune activity in the human body.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  I think the warning on the packet should've said that?
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    People didn't think the public could be trusted with that level of nuance. Turns out the public really doesn't like it when you treat them as idiots and the former group reaped what they sowed.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      The public really is an idiot though, unfortunately.
abathur 4y ago
I think (at least) three big problems intersect here: 1. the sci/med establishment seems to have some ongoing ~bias issues that I don't fully understand when it comes to listening to and taking lay people seriously (especially women) 2. it's hard to do complex synthesis of relative risks and rewards across different studies measuring different things for different reasons 3. we've had a lot of uninformed and malicious actors splashing about in the information ecosystem It's a two-way street. Researchers and public health officials both need to take women seriously and they need to have faith that they can research or discuss details like this frankly through their normal semi-public publication channels without people who don't grok or don't care about the nuance of their research using it as an info-cudgel to induce FUD that ruins lives. To toss in the requisite anecdata, my sister got pregnant this past fall. She was due for a booster but FUD about it hurting the baby swayed her mind. She got omicron in late December, post-covid complications nearly took her and the baby in late February, and she had to live in the hospital until she delivered in June.
- origin_path 4y ago
  I have a lot of unvaccinated friends, some of whom have now had COVID. Their experience is not any different to those who were vaccinated. Bear in mind, Omicron emerged in 25% vaccinated South Africa and the reports from there were that it was so mild people didn't even realize they had COVID. The problem with your view about "uninformed and malicious actors" is that this is how public health describes anyone who points out their mistakes. It's a cliché they use to shut down debate and opposition. I've read a lot of material about vaccines now from non-public health sources and never seen any that could be described as malicious or uninformed. Indeed, they are usually way more informed than those who simply "follow the science". And the idea they're malicious is pure Hollywood fiction. None of them ever are. They just want to know what's true about the disease and vaccines. You could though, argue that about the public health officials who constantly lie to the public about scientific topics in order to generate compliance.
  - abathur 4y ago
    Not sure how things things you project on my view about uninformed and malicious actors in our broad information ecosystem are a problem for my view.
c7DJTLrn 4y ago
Many people had concerns about the vaccine rollout. Not because we were worried about some 5G nanoparticle Bill Gates conspiracy nonsense but because of the potential unknown side effects. Doing a trial on a few hundred thousand and then rolling out to billions is like testing your changes locally and then pushing them straight to production. "But human bodies are not anything like software dev" I hear you say. You're right. Biology is way more complicated and we know less about the mechanics of our own bodies than the computers we designed. If we go forward assuming everything we do is infallible and silencing anybody with concerns, someday we will have a real disaster.
- mint2 4y ago
  The vaccines were heavily politicized and the politicizing of them was not coming from a place of legitimate concerns, clearly shown by the same groups embracing snake oil cures with the only info backing them making the vaccine studies look like the most thorough studies ever done in the history of humanity. There were No worries about side effects for the sketchy snake oil.
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  > someday we will have a real disaster. Real disasters always happen, but it happens to 'other' individuals, so no one is bothered.
- planarhobbit 4y ago
  > Biology is way more complicated and we know less about the mechanics of our own bodies than the computers we designed. We don’t know much about that either, to be fair.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  >If we go forward assuming everything we do is infallible and silencing anybody with concerns, someday we will have a real disaster. And if we go down this road hopefully it's sooner rather than later. The people responsible should have to live (or not) through the suck rather than having some yet unknown future generation be saddled with cleaning up the mess.
- 4y ago
bsaul 4y ago
The problem now is that so many people, in so many fields, relayed that "everything's safe, if you disagree or dare casting doubts you're an a ti-science sociopath", that it's going to be super super hard for them to admit they were wrong.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  - inquirerGeneral 4y ago
    Mishandle? They got the vaccine rolled out by August and September to start production. One of the few things Trump did correctly was the early pandemic handling while the cries of "stop travel from China" was called racist and unnecessary. There was nothing else that could have been done except fire the head of the CDC after their flip flop politics instead of science.
    - mint2 4y ago
      > One of the few things Trump did correctly was the early pandemic handling while the cries of "stop travel from China" was called racist and unnecessary. Except it was because by that time the horse was long out of the barn and the China ban failed spectacularly. cases were already here and also coming in from Europe. If it didn’t fail why did we get a Covid pandemic? At that point what was needed was massive testing rather than the denialism the trump admin presented. And they failed massively at testing and public education.
      - Auracle 4y ago
        The whole point of what was being messaged at the time, and why we went in to hard lockdowns, was to slow the spread. It makes sense to restrict travel from the place that probably had the most infections at the time if that’s your goal.
        4y ago
throwaway406382 4y ago
From a throwaway because of the potential backlash...This paper is pure bull. They did a survey of 30k people and asked them about their experience and then said that the vaccine didn't cause anything and that we should trust our institutions. They didn't even have a control (unvaccinated) group! Just 30k vaccinated folks who responded to a survey about whether they perceived more/less bleeding, and such. I'm actually working (as a computational mathematician) with an OBGYN and a few other doctors on a paper on this topic right now. We're using real data and a control and doing real Bayesian stats and all of that. But the tragic thing is, we don't need to get fancy. There's so much signal that the vaccine is bad for women's reproductive health that it really is obvious. I hope we can find an uncaptured journal to get it published in. This paper is pure propaganda that's toeing the line about vaccine safety. It's idea laundering so they can later point to an article in "Science" showing that it's safe. I'm so sad that Science (the journal) as fallen so far and is so captured.
- manwe150 4y ago
  How bad is it for health? This paper also notes that the virus itself is of great concern foremost, so any conclusion must be in comparison to the alternative (aka the control group): “Studies and anecdotal reports are already demonstrating that menstrual function may be disrupted long term [by the virus], particularly in those with long COVID (32–35)” It seems so many commenters here miss that sentence, and live in a mental world where viruses are mostly benign but healthcare is mostly deadly. Therefore, a statistical control group for such a trial as you describe doing is not an unvaccinated cohort for the same time period, but rather for infinite time. Thus your results will require substantial adjustment for the eventual rates of encountering COVID (and the estimated rates of equivalent adverse effects), since your trial will presumably be of finite duration.
  - peter422 4y ago
    “Placebo Effect Accounts for More Than Two-Thirds of COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events, Researchers Find” https://www.bidmc.org/about-bidmc/news/2022/01/placebo-effect-contributes-to-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-events https://www.bidmc.org/about-bidmc/news/2022/01/placebo-effec... It seems very unintuitive but when you have these studies without a control they are shockingly biased… not due to anybody’s fault, just human nature.
poorbutdebtfree 4y ago
There were several posters on HN pointing out menstrual cycles anecdotes last year and they were largely down voted and possibly shadowbanned. You don't even need censors anymore when the majority decides what is acceptable thought.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  I work in healthcare and life sciences research and I have to censor myself because my account will be banned if I don't. I literally do this for a living, but if I say something a moderator or admin doesnt like or that they feel 'awkward' about I would be gone. Long in the future, when people can admit they are wrong, we will look back on this period with disgust. But, for now, carry on everyone - just a few more people banned and finally we can stop the spread.
magicalhippo 4y ago
Yeah my SO had a very regular cycle before getting the vaccine (Pfizer). After the first shot it got totally out of whack. The doctors say they don't know why that is yet immediately follow up by saying "but the vaccine is completely safe". I'm no anti-vaxxer, but that trips my BS alert bigtime. All I hear is "duck and cover".
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Consider things that can also de-regulate a woman's cycle: Stress, eating different food, eating foods at different times, gaining a couple pounds, losing a couple pounds, getting sick, not sleeping enough, sleeping too much, etc etc etc. The menstrual cycle is often a very sensitive system, and one I would argue most people are very unfamiliar with.
  - magicalhippo 4y ago
    My SO has tracked her cycle in detail for years. Nothing else has changed significantly compared to that period. Her cycle is still not back to normal, 9 months later. I get that it's a sensitive system and it can be affected by a lot of benign factors. But if you don't know why your car is misfiring, how can you say with 100% certainty that there's not an issue with the engine?
- gu4ka474 4y ago
  I’ve been too afraid to post this but you’ve inspired me. I (a male) have always been super horny ever since I hit puberty. I woke up nearly every morning with an erection as long as I can remember. I’ve never had problems with erections with my wife. I got the first Pfizer vaccine last year when it became available. The next time I was intimate with my wife, I lost my erection during sex - the first time it has ever happened in my life. “Normal” side effect they said. Things got a little better so I was encouraged. I got the second vaccine as scheduled. The next two times we had sex I completely lost my erection during sex. I’ve been searching to see if other men have had the same problem but either I am the only one, or everyone just sweeps it under the rug. It’s been almost a year and I rarely have random erections. I thankfully don’t lose erections during sex, but I am no longer horny. I used to be the one to initiate sex through our marriage but now my wife usually does. My sex life has taken a huge hit since getting the vaccines. Of course I can’t blame the vaccines, but you will not be able to convince me that this is a coincidence. The reason I am writing this is in case there are other men like me who think they are the only ones, because anyone who even thinks the vaccine could cause problems gets labeled an anti-vaxxer nut job. I was pro vaccine (I got my series right away) and still think the vaccine is important, but I think it’s a shame that no one is “allowed” to talk about side effects. This is my anecdotal story.
octonion 4y ago
This is a consequence of the immune response. It's common to every vaccine (or viral infection).
autoexec 4y ago
> but nobody really cared to look at the impact on menstruation or pregnancy beyond confirming that the rate of miscarriage is unchanged. It's hard to blame them for not spending a ton of time before approving the vaccine considering safe changes to menstruation when they were working to do something about the dead bodies which were piling up so quickly they had to be stacked into semi trailers and dumped into mass graves. People were dying in vast numbers and we needed something safe and effective at preventing those deaths and the vaccines were exactly that. Safe and effective. Obviously, they were very much concerned with pregnancy and miscarriage. A vaccine that makes people infertile or causes them to miscarry would never have been approved, but it's pretty reasonable that every possible impact wouldn't be noticed and deeply studied before getting it out to people. Especially those side effects that only impact women since women (especially pregnant women) tend to be underrepresented since they're much more hesitant to enter drug trials in the first place leading to limited data. You can't blame the women for that. If it's unknown if a drug has a negative impact on fertility signing up to try it out on your body or your baby is taking a huge risk. The FDA's policy used to be to exclude women from the earliest trials to protect them for this reason, but that too caused problems to be missed. Adding women in early means it's more likely that a problem that affects only a small percentage of women will be caught, but there are no certainties. For what it's worth, the menstruation issue wasn't ignored by science either. Covid infection also causes changes to menstruation and there was some evidence and concerns that infections may impact fertility in some cases. All of this has been looked into as reports came in. That's the process working. Vaccines are shown to be likely safe so they go out to the public, then doctors and patients continue to report issues that arise to gather data on side effects. Some early papers about the impact of the vaccines on women (and pregnancies) include: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1028455920302175?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S102845592... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7522626/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7522626/ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.11.21264863v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.11.21264863v... https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2211 https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2211 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31822-5/fulltext#:~:text=The%20development%20of%20an%20effective,based%20chemoprophylaxis%20from%20vaccine%20trials https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6.... https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/9900/Severe_Acute_Respiratory_Syndrome_Coronavirus_2.206.aspx https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/9900/Severe_A... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.17.21257337v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.17.21257337v... https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-798175/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-798175/v1
usrn 4y ago
"Trust the science" when there isn't any public study or experiment really means "trust the conjecture" but that's not so great for PR.

pygy_ 4y ago

Animals studies (made IIRC by Pfizer or BioNTech, and using GFAP mRNA, not the spike protein) had shown that while most lipid nanoparticles stay at the injection sites, (quoting from memory) ~10-20% end up in the blood stream, then enter myocardial, hepatic, adrenal and gonadic tissues. In other words, organs that consume a large amount of cholesterol. My informed guess would be that the nanoparticles combine with HDL/LDL in the blood stream, and end up in the cells that consume these, but this is speculation. This would end up disrupting the ovarian endocrine cells (cholesterol is the chemical precursor of sex hormones), which can regenerate once the RNA and its product has been eliminated. The future egg cells should not be affected (and AFAIK the ovarian reserve is not damaged by the COVID vaccines), and neither is sperm production.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

skuhn 4y ago

This study began in April 2021 and the paper was published in July 2022. Presuming that the amount of time spent was necessary to thoroughly gather, review and document the findings, what would you have wanted done differently?

gjsman-1000 4y ago
Perhaps we wouldn't have had the news, pretending that there was no effect, and if there was, correlation is not causation, and then saying as little as 5 months ago that there may be an effect but that any effects on menstruation only lasted one day at the most [1]. Just be honest - dishonesty like this breeds anti-vaxxers. [1] https://youtu.be/TWk2Z6mzZUU?t=60 https://youtu.be/TWk2Z6mzZUU?t=60 (Good Morning America and ABC News talking about menstruation side effects 5 months ago and basically saying the opposite of this study)
PKop 4y ago
Not taken the vax if your health and age profile didn't merit it, given the unknown unknowns and lack of long term testing, which many people highlighted endlessly for the past year or so. Public concessions exactly to your point that long term testing takes time, and assertions to the contrary that tere are no risks of x, y, z were blatant sophistry intended to silence legitimate criticism. These vaccines were mandated at threat of loss of careers for crying out loud...people are still getting fired for not taking them long after covid is any sort threat whatsoever or where there can be plausible deniability about claims the vaccines actually prevent contracting covid etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004097 (lot of "trust the experts", "you sound like one of the ignorant rubes" type of replies at those links, devoid of any sort of critical thinking, blindly trusting authorities without any acknowledgement to potential downsides outweighing limited upside of vax for many cohorts)
- shitpostbot 4y ago
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  I work in healthcare and life sciences, I am vaxed, and I can say I fully believe you are correct. I have to attest and show my vax cards to keep my job or get a new one and - of all things - we had to show vax cards to go to a behind the scene animal encounter at a zoo. Does the vaccinne stop us from catching it or from giving it to others? There is no evidence, yet, that it does. Am I having to weasel word my post here in the concern that my account will be banned from hacker news even though this is literally what I do for a living? Yes. Yes I am.

slg 4y ago

This lack of foresight is not something specific to this vaccine. It is the male bias ingrained in most western medicine. Due to fear of how experimental medicines will impact fertility and pregnancy, males are usually overrepresented in clinical trials which makes female specific side effects much harder to detect.

jelliclesfarm 4y ago
I agree. This is something that needs discussion.
brightball 4y ago
I'd accept the male bias approach for almost anything except the Covid vax. There was a huge segment of society angrily screaming at everyone that everything was perfectly safe, if you didn't take it you were anti-vax and wanted to kill grandma. It was absolutely insanity on every social media channel. I'm sure some nuanced bits were lost in the noise, but it was virtually impossible to openly discuss even hesitation to vaccinate, much less complications. We've heard from 2 local people in our small community who had family members die within 24 hours of vaccination. They were afraid to talk about it because of the blow back that came from anyone mentioning complications. A scary side of a lot of people came out and it's permanently affected my perception of a great many. Maybe there was a male bias in the clinical trials, but I have a hard time believing any information about complications would have been released or accepted at that time.
- slg 4y ago
  > There was a huge segment of society angrily screaming at everyone that everything was perfectly safe, if you didn't take it you were anti-vax and wanted to kill grandma. It was absolutely insanity on every social media channel. I'm sure some nuanced bits were lost in the noise, but it was virtually impossible to openly discuss even hesitation to vaccinate, much less complications. Except when it came to people who were pregnant or hoping to get pregnant. There was relatively open discussion of the potential health impacts in those situations because those were not well understood due to the previously mentioned bias. The general consensus at the time was to get the vaccine, because the thought was that any side effects would be less severe than potentially getting Covid without that extra protection. But those recommendations usually came with a lot more “discuss it with your doctor” disclaimers than the overall “just get it” recommendations for the rest of the population who wasn’t thinking about pregnancies. That slight reservation shows that it wasn’t just a huge coverup to get people vaxxed. It was a genuine lack of knowledge because of how these medicines are almost always tested.

greenthrow 4y ago

Quick Googling shows that the cold and flu can impact ovulation. So it is not a surprise that Covid or its vaccines can as well, since it often presents as more severe. It was still the correct choice of action for you to get the vaccine and potentially delay conception. It is safer for you and the baby if you are vaccinated. This study is just providing confirmation to something that all medical professionals likely assumed is true, based on the common knowledge that the flu and cold and other illnesses can also affect fertility.

junofan 4y ago
> correct choice of action Correct? To… delay conception? According to… you? I am not comfortable leaving decisions like that to others.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  There’s an argument for forcing this decision if it affects others. The prevailing theory, at least at the time, was that widespread vaccination would reduce spread and protect everyone including the unvaccinated. In that case, it could make sense to force people to delay if it means everyone ends up better off overall.
  - OrangeMonkey 4y ago
    My wife and I are at the end of our child-capable years. A delay, even of a year or two, is likely to leave us without. I know you didn't mean this the way it sounded. I know you are probably well educated and think your choices are obvious. I will only state that I have very strong feelings towards someone who tries to force a decision like this on someone else.
    - greenthrow 4y ago
      We are not talking about a delay of a year or two.

airza 4y ago

The problem is that most vaccines affect menstruation; for obvious reasons the uterus is a hotbed of immune activity in the human body.

bamboozled 4y ago
I think the warning on the packet should've said that?
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  People didn't think the public could be trusted with that level of nuance. Turns out the public really doesn't like it when you treat them as idiots and the former group reaped what they sowed.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    The public really is an idiot though, unfortunately.

abathur 4y ago

I think (at least) three big problems intersect here: 1. the sci/med establishment seems to have some ongoing ~bias issues that I don't fully understand when it comes to listening to and taking lay people seriously (especially women) 2. it's hard to do complex synthesis of relative risks and rewards across different studies measuring different things for different reasons 3. we've had a lot of uninformed and malicious actors splashing about in the information ecosystem It's a two-way street. Researchers and public health officials both need to take women seriously and they need to have faith that they can research or discuss details like this frankly through their normal semi-public publication channels without people who don't grok or don't care about the nuance of their research using it as an info-cudgel to induce FUD that ruins lives. To toss in the requisite anecdata, my sister got pregnant this past fall. She was due for a booster but FUD about it hurting the baby swayed her mind. She got omicron in late December, post-covid complications nearly took her and the baby in late February, and she had to live in the hospital until she delivered in June.

origin_path 4y ago
I have a lot of unvaccinated friends, some of whom have now had COVID. Their experience is not any different to those who were vaccinated. Bear in mind, Omicron emerged in 25% vaccinated South Africa and the reports from there were that it was so mild people didn't even realize they had COVID. The problem with your view about "uninformed and malicious actors" is that this is how public health describes anyone who points out their mistakes. It's a cliché they use to shut down debate and opposition. I've read a lot of material about vaccines now from non-public health sources and never seen any that could be described as malicious or uninformed. Indeed, they are usually way more informed than those who simply "follow the science". And the idea they're malicious is pure Hollywood fiction. None of them ever are. They just want to know what's true about the disease and vaccines. You could though, argue that about the public health officials who constantly lie to the public about scientific topics in order to generate compliance.
- abathur 4y ago
  Not sure how things things you project on my view about uninformed and malicious actors in our broad information ecosystem are a problem for my view.

c7DJTLrn 4y ago

Many people had concerns about the vaccine rollout. Not because we were worried about some 5G nanoparticle Bill Gates conspiracy nonsense but because of the potential unknown side effects. Doing a trial on a few hundred thousand and then rolling out to billions is like testing your changes locally and then pushing them straight to production. "But human bodies are not anything like software dev" I hear you say. You're right. Biology is way more complicated and we know less about the mechanics of our own bodies than the computers we designed. If we go forward assuming everything we do is infallible and silencing anybody with concerns, someday we will have a real disaster.

mint2 4y ago
The vaccines were heavily politicized and the politicizing of them was not coming from a place of legitimate concerns, clearly shown by the same groups embracing snake oil cures with the only info backing them making the vaccine studies look like the most thorough studies ever done in the history of humanity. There were No worries about side effects for the sketchy snake oil.
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
> someday we will have a real disaster. Real disasters always happen, but it happens to 'other' individuals, so no one is bothered.
planarhobbit 4y ago
> Biology is way more complicated and we know less about the mechanics of our own bodies than the computers we designed. We don’t know much about that either, to be fair.
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
>If we go forward assuming everything we do is infallible and silencing anybody with concerns, someday we will have a real disaster. And if we go down this road hopefully it's sooner rather than later. The people responsible should have to live (or not) through the suck rather than having some yet unknown future generation be saddled with cleaning up the mess.
4y ago

bsaul 4y ago

The problem now is that so many people, in so many fields, relayed that "everything's safe, if you disagree or dare casting doubts you're an a ti-science sociopath", that it's going to be super super hard for them to admit they were wrong.

nerdponx 4y ago
- inquirerGeneral 4y ago
  Mishandle? They got the vaccine rolled out by August and September to start production. One of the few things Trump did correctly was the early pandemic handling while the cries of "stop travel from China" was called racist and unnecessary. There was nothing else that could have been done except fire the head of the CDC after their flip flop politics instead of science.
  - mint2 4y ago
    > One of the few things Trump did correctly was the early pandemic handling while the cries of "stop travel from China" was called racist and unnecessary. Except it was because by that time the horse was long out of the barn and the China ban failed spectacularly. cases were already here and also coming in from Europe. If it didn’t fail why did we get a Covid pandemic? At that point what was needed was massive testing rather than the denialism the trump admin presented. And they failed massively at testing and public education.
    - Auracle 4y ago
      The whole point of what was being messaged at the time, and why we went in to hard lockdowns, was to slow the spread. It makes sense to restrict travel from the place that probably had the most infections at the time if that’s your goal.
      - 4y ago

throwaway406382 4y ago

From a throwaway because of the potential backlash...This paper is pure bull. They did a survey of 30k people and asked them about their experience and then said that the vaccine didn't cause anything and that we should trust our institutions. They didn't even have a control (unvaccinated) group! Just 30k vaccinated folks who responded to a survey about whether they perceived more/less bleeding, and such. I'm actually working (as a computational mathematician) with an OBGYN and a few other doctors on a paper on this topic right now. We're using real data and a control and doing real Bayesian stats and all of that. But the tragic thing is, we don't need to get fancy. There's so much signal that the vaccine is bad for women's reproductive health that it really is obvious. I hope we can find an uncaptured journal to get it published in. This paper is pure propaganda that's toeing the line about vaccine safety. It's idea laundering so they can later point to an article in "Science" showing that it's safe. I'm so sad that Science (the journal) as fallen so far and is so captured.

manwe150 4y ago
How bad is it for health? This paper also notes that the virus itself is of great concern foremost, so any conclusion must be in comparison to the alternative (aka the control group): “Studies and anecdotal reports are already demonstrating that menstrual function may be disrupted long term [by the virus], particularly in those with long COVID (32–35)” It seems so many commenters here miss that sentence, and live in a mental world where viruses are mostly benign but healthcare is mostly deadly. Therefore, a statistical control group for such a trial as you describe doing is not an unvaccinated cohort for the same time period, but rather for infinite time. Thus your results will require substantial adjustment for the eventual rates of encountering COVID (and the estimated rates of equivalent adverse effects), since your trial will presumably be of finite duration.
- peter422 4y ago
  “Placebo Effect Accounts for More Than Two-Thirds of COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events, Researchers Find” https://www.bidmc.org/about-bidmc/news/2022/01/placebo-effect-contributes-to-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-events https://www.bidmc.org/about-bidmc/news/2022/01/placebo-effec... It seems very unintuitive but when you have these studies without a control they are shockingly biased… not due to anybody’s fault, just human nature.

poorbutdebtfree 4y ago

There were several posters on HN pointing out menstrual cycles anecdotes last year and they were largely down voted and possibly shadowbanned. You don't even need censors anymore when the majority decides what is acceptable thought.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
I work in healthcare and life sciences research and I have to censor myself because my account will be banned if I don't. I literally do this for a living, but if I say something a moderator or admin doesnt like or that they feel 'awkward' about I would be gone. Long in the future, when people can admit they are wrong, we will look back on this period with disgust. But, for now, carry on everyone - just a few more people banned and finally we can stop the spread.

magicalhippo 4y ago

Yeah my SO had a very regular cycle before getting the vaccine (Pfizer). After the first shot it got totally out of whack. The doctors say they don't know why that is yet immediately follow up by saying "but the vaccine is completely safe". I'm no anti-vaxxer, but that trips my BS alert bigtime. All I hear is "duck and cover".

mrguyorama 4y ago
Consider things that can also de-regulate a woman's cycle: Stress, eating different food, eating foods at different times, gaining a couple pounds, losing a couple pounds, getting sick, not sleeping enough, sleeping too much, etc etc etc. The menstrual cycle is often a very sensitive system, and one I would argue most people are very unfamiliar with.
- magicalhippo 4y ago
  My SO has tracked her cycle in detail for years. Nothing else has changed significantly compared to that period. Her cycle is still not back to normal, 9 months later. I get that it's a sensitive system and it can be affected by a lot of benign factors. But if you don't know why your car is misfiring, how can you say with 100% certainty that there's not an issue with the engine?
gu4ka474 4y ago
I’ve been too afraid to post this but you’ve inspired me. I (a male) have always been super horny ever since I hit puberty. I woke up nearly every morning with an erection as long as I can remember. I’ve never had problems with erections with my wife. I got the first Pfizer vaccine last year when it became available. The next time I was intimate with my wife, I lost my erection during sex - the first time it has ever happened in my life. “Normal” side effect they said. Things got a little better so I was encouraged. I got the second vaccine as scheduled. The next two times we had sex I completely lost my erection during sex. I’ve been searching to see if other men have had the same problem but either I am the only one, or everyone just sweeps it under the rug. It’s been almost a year and I rarely have random erections. I thankfully don’t lose erections during sex, but I am no longer horny. I used to be the one to initiate sex through our marriage but now my wife usually does. My sex life has taken a huge hit since getting the vaccines. Of course I can’t blame the vaccines, but you will not be able to convince me that this is a coincidence. The reason I am writing this is in case there are other men like me who think they are the only ones, because anyone who even thinks the vaccine could cause problems gets labeled an anti-vaxxer nut job. I was pro vaccine (I got my series right away) and still think the vaccine is important, but I think it’s a shame that no one is “allowed” to talk about side effects. This is my anecdotal story.

octonion 4y ago

This is a consequence of the immune response. It's common to every vaccine (or viral infection).

autoexec 4y ago

> but nobody really cared to look at the impact on menstruation or pregnancy beyond confirming that the rate of miscarriage is unchanged. It's hard to blame them for not spending a ton of time before approving the vaccine considering safe changes to menstruation when they were working to do something about the dead bodies which were piling up so quickly they had to be stacked into semi trailers and dumped into mass graves. People were dying in vast numbers and we needed something safe and effective at preventing those deaths and the vaccines were exactly that. Safe and effective. Obviously, they were very much concerned with pregnancy and miscarriage. A vaccine that makes people infertile or causes them to miscarry would never have been approved, but it's pretty reasonable that every possible impact wouldn't be noticed and deeply studied before getting it out to people. Especially those side effects that only impact women since women (especially pregnant women) tend to be underrepresented since they're much more hesitant to enter drug trials in the first place leading to limited data. You can't blame the women for that. If it's unknown if a drug has a negative impact on fertility signing up to try it out on your body or your baby is taking a huge risk. The FDA's policy used to be to exclude women from the earliest trials to protect them for this reason, but that too caused problems to be missed. Adding women in early means it's more likely that a problem that affects only a small percentage of women will be caught, but there are no certainties. For what it's worth, the menstruation issue wasn't ignored by science either. Covid infection also causes changes to menstruation and there was some evidence and concerns that infections may impact fertility in some cases. All of this has been looked into as reports came in. That's the process working. Vaccines are shown to be likely safe so they go out to the public, then doctors and patients continue to report issues that arise to gather data on side effects. Some early papers about the impact of the vaccines on women (and pregnancies) include: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1028455920302175?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S102845592... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7522626/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7522626/ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.11.21264863v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.11.21264863v... https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2211 https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2211 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31822-5/fulltext#:~:text=The%20development%20of%20an%20effective,based%20chemoprophylaxis%20from%20vaccine%20trials https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6.... https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/9900/Severe_Acute_Respiratory_Syndrome_Coronavirus_2.206.aspx https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/9900/Severe_A... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.17.21257337v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.17.21257337v... https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-798175/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-798175/v1

usrn 4y ago

"Trust the science" when there isn't any public study or experiment really means "trust the conjecture" but that's not so great for PR.