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Fertility and COVID-19 Vaccines
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Rumors continue to swirl that the COVID-19 vaccine could be linked to future infertility.
The facts:
Asking about infertility related to the COVID-19 vaccine is reasonable because of genetic similarities between CCOVID-19 and syncytin-1, a protein that plays an important role in placenta development. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine instructs a person's cells to create spike proteins in order to teach the immune system how to spot and destroy a real COVID-19 virus. However, the spike protein is not similar enough to syncytin-1 to make a body attack it.
Although the vaccine is new enough that we do not have long-term data, we do know that 36 women accidentally fell pregnant during the Moderna and Pfizer clinical trials, suggesting that the vaccine does not teach the immune system to attack syncytin-1. As more pregnant women decide to get the vaccine, we should begin to see more data that will help people build confidence in this vaccine.
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Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism
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An anti-vaccine leader claimed victory over the CDC, saying that a FOIA request he sent led to them retracting the claim that vaccines do not cause autism on their website.
The facts:
The FOIA request and what the CDC has on its website is entirely meaningless.
Excessive alarm about the rate of autism diagnosis is one of the factors spurring the vaccine-autism. The reasons for the rise in these rates are multi-faceted: changes in diagnostic criteria, increased awareness, educational changes, and lowered rates of intellectual disability account for most of the rising rates. Biological risk factors such as father's age and premature birth could account for a rise in some incidence of autism.
And there's plenty of evidence that vaccines do not cause autism. Not only do the studies done to date show vaccines are not in any way linked to autism, but studies indicate disorganization of the prefrontal cortex in the brains of autistic people, linked to development in the womb. Of all the risk factors in developing autism, we know genetics looks the most likely and being vaccinated is not among them.
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Doctors Getting Vaccinated
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A widely-circulated video shows doctors proclaiming that they will not get the COVID-19, largely because they claim that the pandemic is not real and that the vaccine was not well-tested.
The facts:
A wide variety of doctors are included in this video, from a forensic psychiatrist to a natural health practitioner to a doctor who lost his license to practice.
We know that the pandemic is real because COVID-19 was the leading cause of death in the United States, killing over 400,000 in a year. Worldwide, 105 million people have been sickened by COVID-19, and 2 million of them have died. All of that illness and all of those deaths are real.
Because of the massive amount of illness and death, the scientific community responded quickly to make a vaccine, but they did not cut corners. Large-scale and thorough clinical trials did occur, with tens of thousand of volunteers receiving either a vaccine or a placebo so that the outcomes of the two groups could be compared.
So how did we get this vaccine so quickly if corners were not cut? Time, resources, people devoted to the vaccine, with portions of the development happening concurrently (like swim lanes instead of a relay race).
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Vaccine Fact of the Week to Share
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Are you getting a COVID-19 vaccine? You are the shareable!
Upload your selfies to our website and share those that have been shared on our Facebook and Instagram pages!
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