Coronavirus Vaccines Don’t Impact Fertility. But COVID-19 Might.

Empiric data shows no link between COVID vaccines and fertility issues

There’s a meme flying around the interwebs that COVID vaccines might render young people infertile. Taken on its own, this may seem like run-of-the-mill antivax fear-mongering, and it is, but this one seems to have some legs. In fact, a UK survey found that one quarter of young women would decline the vaccine, citing concerns about fertility.

This is actually a sort of old vaccine trope — it’s been trotted out, without any evidence, for the polio vaccine, and the HPV vaccine. And I get why it’s so powerful. Fertility is obviously a huge issue — a basic human function. But it also immediately conjures up the long-term — sure, I may be protected from COVID today, but what if I want to have kids 15 years from now, and find out I can’t. Handmaids Tale stuff. Disturbing.

So I want to show how this thing got started, but more importantly, I want to make an argument, that if you really want to worry about fertility — you should worry about SARS-CoV-2 more than the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.

You can trace the earliest emergence of this idea to two guys — Wolfgang Wodarg, a physician and German politician and Michael Yeadon, an ex-Pfizer scientist. Yeadon’s…