Update: COVID Vaccines Did Not Cause Miscarriages
The Claim
The COVID-19 vaccines have caused almost 920 miscarriages to date.
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Emerging story
In early June, a post about vaccines and miscarriages went viral on Instagram. This post showed a screenshot of an article titled, “920 Women Lose Their Unborn Babies After Getting Vaccinated.”
In the text of the post, the user recommended for people to check the number of post-vaccine miscarriages on the website www.openvaers.com and to watch a video of a Canadian researcher who claimed that the spike protein in the vaccines is a toxin.
This post soon reached a wide audience. Within two weeks, it had gained over 72,000 likes. Since this post, a number of other users have been repeating the claim.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar’s investigation concludes that the Instagram post is incorrect to correlate these miscarriages with coronavirus vaccines.
In April, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study into the findings of the mRNA vaccines on pregnant women. The study noted that “calculated proportions of adverse pregnancy and neonatal outcomes in persons vaccinated against COVID-19 who had a completed pregnancy were similar to incidences reported in studies involving pregnant women that were conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic.” In other words, there was no change in pregnancy outcomes from before and after vaccination. Overall, this study could not find any obvious safety issues related to the coronavirus vaccines on pregnant women.
The Instagram post links to the OpenVAERS website. While the OpenVAERS website, which collects data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, states that in the USA there have been 652 cases of miscarriages post-vaccine, these miscarriages have not been caused by coronavirus vaccines. Instead, these miscarriages occurred regardless of the vaccine. Just because they occurred after the vaccine had been administered, does not link them to the vaccine.
Health experts, such as the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Anne Schuchat, have stated that coronavirus itself poses a greater health risk to pregnant women than other people. She used this fact to stress why pregnant women should get vaccinated. This fact is also highlighted on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.
We have also already disproved the claim that the vaccine creates a dangerous toxin. In summary, these statements are not reflective of any human studies, which show that the spike protein does not cause harm.
The claim that the vaccines are causing miscarriages is an example of correlation being mistaken for causation. Just because two events happened to the same person, does not mean one event caused the other. Just because these miscarriages occurred after the vaccine had been administered, does not link them to the vaccine. To provide another example, in 2020, cold brew coffee saw a 3,000% increase in orders in the U.S. But cold brew coffee did not give people coronavirus infections, which also increased in that year.
