Thread by @FLermyte

Thread: mRNA vaccines will not affect your fertility. A rumour was started recently, and it has people worried. Unlike most anti-vax nonsense, these guys actually wrote a petition to the @EMA_News to stop life-saving trials. I read it. Here’s the breakdown of their claims:

1) PCR isn’t reliable, so trial results are random false positives. Calling the odds of getting a 162/8 (Pfizer) or 185/11 (Moderna) split by chance astronomical, gives too much credit to astronomy. Don’t believe me? Flip a coin 170 times and try to get heads 162 times. I’ll wait

1b) In case it needs saying, the tests were carried out by labs after self-reporting of symptoms. Neither the labs, nor the patients knew who was in the vaccine or control group, so there was no nefarious increasing/decreasing of PCR cycles (which is a story for another day)

2) Antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), with examples of old experiments on animals where vaccination against SARS-1 led to more severe disease when challenged with virus. But: severe cases split as 9/1 and 30/0 in the mRNA trials. Conclusion: no ADE; this claim is nonsense

3) Something about the spike protein being homologous to human syncytin-1, and antibodies therefore potentially attacking syncytin-1 and preventing placenta formation. So here’s what you get when you run a tool called “BLAST” and look for human proteins similar to spike

3b) Hmm. Maybe Bill Gates/Big Pharma is hiding the results? Well, we can force a computer to try to align the sequences. Do this for proteins that are actually related, and you see long stretches of similarity. Example: spike of SARS-CoV-2 and of a coronavirus that infects cows

3c) And here is human syncytin-1 (the protein that the fertility claim revolves around) and gibbon syncytin-1. Like with the two spike proteins, a stretch of hundreds of amino acids where there’s similarity, and a high similarity score

3d) So here’s the SARS-CoV-2 spike versus human syncytin-1. The best it can do are a few short stretches of 20-30% similarity, with a low score as a result. This is random chance. There is no meaningful similarity.

3e) I want to drive this point home, so here’s spike protein versus a goldfish protein called myoglobin. Why myoglobin? Because it’s a cheap standard protein in my lab fridge. Why a goldfish? Just my own personal amusement. It matches about as well as the syncytin-1

3f) And just because I can, here’s the human syncytin-1 we’re all supposed to be worried about, versus the goldfish protein. Again, we see the same pattern of short stretches having some similarity by random chance

3g) I’m not the only one who’s baffled by this bizarre claim. Here’s a thread by @andrew_croxford - an actual immunologist - who also had some fun with sequence alignments

https://twitter.com/andrew_croxford/status/1334593606196187136?s=20

3h) And one by Prof. @BallouxFrancois of UCL

https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1334250954921824261?s=20

Conclusion: there’s no substance to this claim. There’s no controversy. There’s no whistleblower. This is fearmongering and trying to put pressure on an overworked government agency and on politicians with no scientific training. Don’t spread misinformation. In 2020, it can kill