“Opinion: Why Young Women and Pregnant Women NEED to get Vaccinated”

There have been various heated discussions regarding the safety of the COVID-Vaccines for women, specifically young women and pregnant women. Many have questioned the vaccine’s effects on fertility and the vaccine’s effect on pregnant women. A common fear is that the vaccine is going to have bad effects in the long term. This fear has prevented many young women and pregnant women from getting the vaccine. Sadly, misinformation is rampant, and there needs to be more focus on the actual facts that we have from professionals regarding this topic to ensure that everyone becomes vaccinated so the world can go back to normal. There’s been several pieces of evidence proving against the idea that the Covid-19 vaccine will affect a women’s health regarding fertility. 

The myth that women would have pregnancy problems when getting a vaccine is rooted from around December 2020. Henry Ford Health System posted an article explaining that a German epidemiologist theorized that the vaccine would possibly cause a rejection of a protein in the woman’s placenta. This would be because “the genetic code of the placenta protein, called syncytin-1, shares a hint of similarity with the genetic code of the spike protein in COVID-19” the article explains.  The epidemiologist simply thought that this was the case, he didn’t do any experiments to test his hypothesis. Prior to his claim and since then, there have been multiple pieces of evidence proving his theoretical fear incorrect. Dr. Viki Male, a woman with a PhD in natural killer cells in human pregnancy who studies at University of Cambridge, discusses another cause of the misinformation spread. Michael Yeadon, a former employee of Pfizer said the same thing as the German epidemiologist. Dr. Male informs people that there isn’t similarity between the proteins at all. She says that someone who attended Yale actually performed an experiment to see if those proteins actually connected and found that they didn’t. 

So as we see there’s no problem with pregnant women taking the vaccine, yet there’s still many people being hesitant if they haven’t got the vaccine to see its effects on fertility. In an article written by Dr. Victoria Male on Nature Review Immunology, she discusses this issue. When the clinical trials were performed with women they would be able to debunk the idea behind fertility. Although asked not to become pregnant, by the end of the study 57 pregnancies occurred. There was no difference in the rate of accidental pregnancies compared to the regular groups, which means the vaccine would cause no fertility problems. The study also proved that there were no miscarriages.

It baffles me that considering we have a pandemic on, people choose to believe these ridiculous theoretical fears, which prevents them from taking the vaccine along with influencing others not to take it. The benefits of taking the vaccine outweighs the theoretical risk.  From the studies done we can see that there’s no risk for women, pregnant or not pregnant to get the vaccine. I’ve known pregnant women who have gotten their vaccine and have been fine along with several young women my age. There’s no risk. Stay safe for yourself and others and get the vaccine!

Sources: 

1.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-021-00525-y

2.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFudXb8l7H8

3.https://www.henryford.com/blog/2021/04/fertility-rumor-covid-vaccine