COVID-19 VACCINES DON’T CAUSE FEMALE INFERTILITY: PFIZER

Pfizer has debunked the claim made by a former company researcher and his German pal that COVID-19 vaccines cause female infertility because they contain a protein that is crucial for placenta development, Abby Haglage reported for Yahoo LIfe.

“Later iterations of the myth claimed that the vaccine may not contain that placental protein (known as syncytin-1) but that the genetic sequence it contains is so similar to the placental protein that it will confuse the body into attacking them both,” Haglage added.

Pfizer said the concept was was not floated by Pfizer’s head of research but by two non-Pfizer-affiliated individuals: One is a scientist named Michael Yeadon who left Pfizer 10 years ago and has made multiple baseless claims about the pandemic, including one in November when he declared that the pandemic was “effectively over” and that vaccines were unnecessary.

His co-author is a German physician named Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, who has similarly spread misinformation during the pandemic, including a video in late April in which he called COVID-19 “harmless.”

“Rumors saying that they’re using the placenta protein instead of the spike protein, that’s just flat-out wrong,” says Richard Kennedy, an immunologist and co-director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group. Kennedy says the idea that the genetic sequence of the spike protein is very similar to the genetic sequence of syncytin-1 is also wrong. “The amount of similarity is minute,” says Kennedy.

Both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines use a novel approach to immunity known as messenger RNA (mRNA), which — contrary to fear-mongering Facebook posts — is considered to be safer than previous vaccines.

Instead of relying on live or deactivated virus, the mRNA vaccines use the genetic sequence of the spike protein, which is found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, to trigger an immune response.

Kennedy says that the spike protein has roughly 1,300 amino acids, which fold together to form the protein; out of these, just four overlap with syncytin-1. “I tried an online tool that compares protein sequences — it couldn’t even line the two proteins up to compare them, that is how dissimilar they were,” he says. If the spike protein were somehow similar enough to syncytin-1 to prompt the immune system to attack them both, then all women who contracted COVID-19 would be infertile.

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