Thread by @VikiLovesFACS

@SpeechlessMJJ16 Sure. This is a screenshot from a blog post by Michael Yeadon that was published in December. It was rapidly taken down, but this screenshot (and another of the title of the post) circulated on WhatsApp. It is the source of the infertility rumours. 1/

@SpeechlessMJJ16 So that you are aware, Michael Yeadon is very strongly anti-vax in his views. So that is where he is coming from. 2/

@SpeechlessMJJ16 Even back in December, people who work with in this area (like me) were able to point to flaws with this argument. Probably the most important one is... if this were true, Covid would *also* make women infertile. Although happily it does not. 3/

@SpeechlessMJJ16 Getting more into the molecular biology of the situation, we also know that SARS-CoV2 spike and Syncytin-1 actually don’t resemble each other. So even at a very basic level, the claim is false. 4/

@SpeechlessMJJ16 Here is a thread I wrote on it at the time, with more details... 5/

https://twitter.com/vikilovesfacs/status/1339510379332988929

@SpeechlessMJJ16 So we had all these reasons to disbelieve these claims. But nonetheless, these rumours started to worry a lot of people. So @aliceluculligan and @VirusesImmunity said: okay, let’s formally test these claims in the lab. 6/

@SpeechlessMJJ16 @aliceluculligan @VirusesImmunity The claim is that antibodies against the viral protein spike will bind the placental protein Syncytin. Do they took antibodies from ppl who had recovered from Covid (which contain a large proportion of anti-spike antibodies) and looked to see if they bind to Syncytin... 7/

@SpeechlessMJJ16 @aliceluculligan @VirusesImmunity They do not.

Lu-Culligan and Iwasaki wrote a nice article about it here... 8/

nytimes.com/2021/01/26/opi…

@SpeechlessMJJ16 @aliceluculligan @VirusesImmunity When I started working on this, I spent a lot of time talking about these claims and the evidence they are not true. I don’t do that so much now because most ppl don’t care about the details of the mechanism, the just want to know: will the vaccine stop me getting pregnant? 9/

@SpeechlessMJJ16 @aliceluculligan @VirusesImmunity The data showing that in well-controlled clinical trial settings, people who are vaccinated become pregnant at the same rate as people who are not vaccinated is the data that speaks best to that concern, so this is what I mainly focus on now. 10/

@SpeechlessMJJ16 @aliceluculligan @VirusesImmunity There is also some super cool data that I know is about to come out showing that, among ppl having IVF, the rates of pregnancy are the same in whether you are vaccinated or not. I will tweet that when it’s published, which I think will be in the next few weeks. 11/

@SpeechlessMJJ16 @aliceluculligan @VirusesImmunity Again, what I like about that dataset is that we have this really clean vaccinated vs unvaccinated control that gives us a lot of confidence. 12/

@SpeechlessMJJ16 @aliceluculligan @VirusesImmunity And of course, we also have a lot of data on ppl vaccinated in the general rollout and now pregnant. This is a lot of people, but there’s not a formal unvaccinated control group, like in the clinical trials and the IVF study. 13/

@SpeechlessMJJ16 @aliceluculligan @VirusesImmunity I hope this gives you some insight into where these rumours came from and what has been done to cobfirm that they are not true. 14/14