Re:Trends in menstrual bleeding changes after SARS-CoV-2 vac...
by autoexec on Sunday July 17, 2022 @08:08PM
(#32132924)
> 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:
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/S102845592...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7522626/
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.11.21264863v...
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2211
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6....
https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/9900/Severe_A...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.17.21257337v...
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-798175/v1