Vaccines, the only light at the end of this grim tunnel called “COVID-19 pandemic.” Now that scientists have developed several safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19, we should put them in people’s arms as quickly as possible. Yet that isn’t happening. In many countries people are doing a great job with immunizing freezers. Of course, I cannot blame hospitals or doctors, because distributing a large amount of vaccines is an immense logistical challenge. Still, we should try to do better.
Meanwhile, in Latvia we have an even worse problem. Back in autumn Latvia preordered a large amount of AstraZeneca vaccines and only a tiny amount of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Why? Well, AstraZeneca vaccines are cheap and can be stored in a fridge. Meanwhile, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are much more expensive. Moderna’s vaccine requires long-term storage at minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit). Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine requires minus 70°C (minus 94°F) or lower.
Why bother preordering expensive vaccines with complicated storage requirements when AstraZeneca vaccines are much cheaper and easy to use? After all, what could possibly go wrong? (At this point you are welcome to laugh about Latvian politicians’ incompetence.)
Vaccines were preordered back in autumn when nobody knew in advance their efficiency and approval dates. Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved for use within European Union already in December. Moderna vaccine was approved by EU soon after. AstraZeneca vaccine still isn’t approved for use within the EU. So far Latvia has received a tiny amount of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines that were preordered, most of those have already been used to vaccinate some doctors. And now we are mostly sitting and just waiting for AstraZeneca vaccines to get approved and delivered to Latvia. We can’t even immunize freezers, because the vaccines aren’t available. (In case you are wondering, Latvian Minister of Health lost her job a few days ago because of her blunder with preordering vaccines.)
Getting people vaccinated isn’t easy. Firstly, the number of available vaccine doses is limited, producing them takes time. Secondly, getting vaccines into people’s arms is an complicated logistical challenge. Thirdly, antivaxxers. For example, in one Latvian hospital only 10% of workers agreed to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Today I read a news article about how Latvian school teachers are mostly unwilling to get vaccinated once vaccines become available, because they fear that vaccines might cause female infertility. And when I look at online news articles about vaccination process in Latvia, I see comments like, “If you want to live, don’t get a vaccine.” According to some people, COVID-19 is a hoax, it’s either imaginary or no different than flu, and vaccines are either designed to kill people or at least make them infertile. Amusingly enough, the same people who protest against lockdown and physical distancing are also adamant that they don’t want to get vaccinated. Apparently, they want to get sick and die instead.
David Gorski from respectfulinsolence.com recently published an excellent post titled “Vaccines cause female infertility: Another antivax lie resurrected and repackaged for COVID-19.” From said article:
One of the most common false claims made by the antivaccine movement is that a vaccine (or vaccines in general) somehow result in female infertility. Sure, antivaxxers will sometimes promote the idea that vaccines cause sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) or simply kill older children, but not nearly as often as they like to spread the persistent myth that vaccines somehow “sterilize” females. Examples abound and can be found around the world, for example, from the conspiracy theory promoted by Catholic bishops in Kenya that the tetanus vaccine is “racist population control” and that the false claim in Africa and the Philippines (among other places) that the polio vaccine can impair female fertility, while in some Muslim countries the campaign to eradicate polio has long been plagued by conspiracy theories that claim that the polio vaccine is laced with anti-fertility chemicals that would render their girls sterile before they even became women (and/or can also infect them with HIV) as part of a plot to depopulate the developing world. (Indeed, portraying vaccines as “eugenics” is a popular antivaccine trope.) Of course, the vaccine most commonly falsely cited by antivaxxers as causing female infertility is the HPV vaccine, particularly Gardasil, which is blamed without evidence for premature ovarian failure (now more commonly known as primary ovarian insufficiency), usually based on some hand waving misunderstanding of immunology attributing this “effect” to some vaguely defined autoimmune phenomenon. This claim that a specific vaccine (or vaccines) can cause infertility is what I like to refer to as a “slasher” lie, because, like the killers in 1980s slasher movies, who appear to have been finally killed at the end of one installment, these lies always manage to somehow survive to kill more teenagers in the next movie.
So it should come as no surprise that, with the rollout of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19 under an FDA emergency use authorization (EUA), with the vaccine by Moderna very likely to follow very soon in distribution, this old slasher lie has found new life, this time in the form of the claim that these two vaccines cause—surprise! surprise!—female infertility!
This particular antivaxxer lie is just so silly. Infertility? Yeah right.
On this planet, there is a huge market for contraceptives. People literally pay billions of dollars for various substances that promise to prevent conception. Among all those people who want to have sex that cannot result in a pregnancy, there are some who want permanent birth control at some point in their life. Maybe they want to remain childfree like I did. Or maybe they already have children and they don’t want any more.
I paid a lot of money to a surgeon who removed some of my internal reproductive organs. I underwent a laparoscopic surgery that required me to stay in a clinic for two days, afterwards I couldn’t exercise or have sex for a month. And did I mention it was expensive?
Conspiracy theorists speculate that pharmaceutical companies have invented some substance that reliably renders people infertile after just a single injection and has no other side effects thus ensuring that a victim cannot notice that some vaccine they were given actually made them infertile.
If there existed some medicine that could have made me infertile after a single injection without causing any side effects, I would have been willing to pay a lot of money for it. Let me rephrase it: if pharmaceutical companies had invented such a miracle drug, they wouldn’t be giving it to non-consenting people under the guise of some vaccine; instead these companies would earn billions of dollars by selling this drug to people like me who want permanent birth control.
A decade ago I read about conspiracy theories claiming that eating GMO corn on a regular basis causes infertility in people and animals (I don’t know what anti-GMO conspiracy theorists claim nowadays, I don’t want to research that). Again, if eating a serving of some cheap staple food on a regular basis could reliably render me infertile, I would have bought and eaten that food.
Reliable birth control that is simple to use and doesn’t cause unwanted side effects is complicated. With typical use, chance of pregnancy during first year of use is 9% with combination pill and 13% with progestin-only pill. It’s 0.8% with copper IUD. With male condom the failure rate is 18% with typical use and 2% with perfect use. And female sterilization has a 0.5% failure rate; vasectomy has a 0.15% failure rate.
You want an injection that renders women infertile? DMPA (depot medroxyprogesterone acetate), under brand names such as Depo-Provera, is used in hormonal birth control as a long-lasting progestogen-only injectable contraceptive to prevent pregnancy in women. It is given by intramuscular or subcutaneous injection and forms a long-lasting depot, from which it is slowly released over a period of several months. Estimates of first-year failure rates are about 0.3% with perfect use and 6% with typical use. Firstly, this injection only lasts for several months and you need a new injection every 12 weeks. Secondly, there can be side effects. It’s not some kind of miracle injection that reliably renders a woman permanently infertile after a single dose and with no side effects thus ensuring that she doesn’t even notice it.
Even when people do their best to correctly use whichever method of birth control they have chosen, failure rates are still rather high in most cases. Rendering a person infertile without their cooperation is much harder. That’s why racist eugenics movements used surgeries, because those actually are permanent. But reliably rendering a person permanently infertile against their will with some injection or something that they swallow, yeah right.
Of course, it would be possible to permanently render a person infertile by making them extremely sick, but then there would be side effects and the victim would notice that something is wrong.
Does some person want to have a healthy baby? You know what, chronic lack of sleep, stress, tobacco, obesity, poor nutrition etc. risk factors are known to negatively influence a person’s ability to have a healthy baby. Instead of worrying about some imaginary risk from vaccines, people who want children could actually pay attention to their lifestyle choices that actually harm their health. How comes conspiracy theorists don’t spend their energy telling people to quit smoking? That actually would be useful for public health.
The nice thing about the infertility lie is that even if it were true, individual people wouldn’t be able to tell for a long time. The “vaccinations kill kids” lie is relatively easy to disprove: you vaccinate a school-full of childrean and see that they don’t die. But a lay person doesn’t know that a woman is infertile until she actually tries to get pregnant and doesn’t succeed for some length of time (years.) And most women don’t try except a few times in their life. You’d need for the individual you’re trying to convince to know a number of women who got vaccinated and see that most later got pregnant. (Keep in mind, a fair number of women — and men — are already infertile, so you’ll have a few false positives for your lie.)
Add to that that the medical profession is infamously misogynistic and paternalistic and willing to lie, and you can understand why women might be inclined to distrust pronouncements about the safety of the new vaccines. The thing is, if the vaccines did cause infertility in women, it would be entirely believable that the medical profession might not see that as a problem, especially if it didn’t do that in all cases, and \begin{sarcasm} they wouldn’t want to worry the fragile little woman-brains with something that might get them all emotional, or rather more than they already are.\end{sarcasm}
It’s not just women (white or otherwise) who have reason to distrust the medical profession. In the USA, a lot of African-Americans are unwilling to get vaccinated because they — for good reasons — do not trust the medical establishment. The pervasive racism in the medical profession — doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc. — has been well-documented for a long time and has been well-known in the African-American community for much longer, and of course you get stuff like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or the experiments of J. Marion Sims.
Add also that society on the whole values women largely for their ability to produce children, so that infertility is seen as invalidating her womanhood.
I spent two years getting kicked out of doctors’ offices until I finally found a doctor who agreed to sterilize me (albeit reluctantly, at first she stated that she cannot sterilize a person who doesn’t already have at least two kids, and it took me a lengthy explanation to convince her that I really do not want any kids at all). Pretty much every doctor with whom I have ever spoken valued my fertility higher than my overall health and even higher than my life. They’d rather watch me suffer stress, fear, and gender dysphoria than, gasp, allow me to not have biological children. The average doctor would rather watch me die during pregnancy than allow me to choose that I do not want to get pregnant in the first place.
Also, if you are a trans masculine-leaning person, majority of people, including doctors, will talk about how your fertility is the most valuable thing about your body and how you cannot be allowed to access medical procedures that would make your body more masculine and infertile, because baby making is the only thing valuable about you. When trans men make themselves infertile during transitioning, that is somehow seen as a horrible sacrifice and self-mutilation.
I’m willing to believe you that attitudes might be different in USA and that the life experiences of AFAB people of color could be different from mine, but what you describe really differs from everything I have experienced.
If they wanted a scare tactic, they would have lied, “Pfizer and Moderna have 73 side effects!”, conflating them with China’s Sinovac vaccine which does. Pfizer’s has been shown to have side effects on people with allergies.
Results from Brazil say Sinovac is only 50% effective. China is pushing it heavily on developing countries both to make a buck, and as “medical diplomacy”. At least Taiwan’s medical diplomacy didn’t cause anyone harm (millions of masks/PPE and functioning ventilators).
Of course becoming dead from the virus is a quicker way of reducing your fertility.
Intransitive @ # 3: If they wanted a scare tactic, they would have lied, “Pfizer and Moderna have 73 side effects!”
Which reminds me of something I read last night concerning the politics of the 1773 Boston Tea Party (Theodore Draper, A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution, pg 393:
While it’s not possible to 100% rule out such a side effect, there is absolutely no reason to believe it’s likely. It’s just a common fear mongering tactic anti vaxxers use for pretty much any new vaccine. In addition to the part you quoted from Gorski’s blog post, he also goes into how the scientific explanation they use to suggest it could cause sterilization makes absolutely no sense. They might as well claim it will make my balls shrivel up and fall off. It’s about as likely as the mechanism they proposed.
@5 I suppose they would have wanted to compare tea to tobacco, which, as an American product, was just great for you.
I would say that this is part of the same thing: by virtue of having (or having once had, or looking like you once had) a uterus, it is not up to you to decide these things. What they have in common is that you don’t get to decide what is done with your body. They know what’s best and you are treated as non compos mentis. If you were a female-bodied member of a despised minority (in the USA, that means Black; in Latvia, maybe that would mean Roma (Gypsy)), you might have had the opposite problem — they would use any excuse to do a hysterectomy on you. (Probably with inadequate anaesthesia.)
tl;dr — Teh Patriarchy in action.
Allison @#8
I once wrote about this here https://freethoughtblogs.com/andreasavester/2020/09/17/freedom-of-reproductive-choices/
Other than that, when it comes to vaccines, the exact same vaccine is given both to white women and to women of color. This causes a logical problem with your original statement (“if the vaccines did cause infertility in women, it would be entirely believable that the medical profession might not see that as a problem”), because bigoted doctors interested in eugenics would have to be immensely concerned about making sure that white women have as many babies as possible.
Pierce R. Butler @#5
I love this one. The list of medical problems here is just amazing.
It’s fascinating how whenever people dislike something, they will ascribe to this thing a list of medical problems that they consider scary. For example, people used to claim that masturbation causes blindness and makes you to grow hair on your palms.
Andreas Avester @ # 10: … people used to claim that masturbation causes blindness and makes you to grow hair on your palms.
I have yet to meet a hairy-palmed person with vision problems.
When my father had cancer, and other treatments failed, some awful people who should never be allowed to work in the medical profession tried to discourage him from getting radiation therapy because it might cause infertility. Unlike with vaccines, radiation therapy can sometimes cause infertility. And yet, I know my dad would have preferred living with infertility than dying of cancer.
“Apparently, they want to get sick and die instead”. To which I say,”Good”. Maybe then we can purge some of the stupidity from the gene pool. (I know that’s a rotten thing to say, but these people infuriate me so!)