"She is a very highly followed influencer in what we call the pseudo-medical community," Smith says. Formerly best known for her writing about feminism, Wolf has, over the years, drifted into anti-vaccine advocacy. One of the people reading this page was an anti-vaccine campaigner named Naomi Wolf. There were a lot of posts by ordinary people there, looking for answers, but anti-vaccine activists were also part of the group. "It's called, literally 'COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects,' " Smith says. But there was one Facebook group in particular that turned out to be important. Many were just wondering if it had happened to others and whether they should be worried. With no firm data, stories about the disruption to menstrual cycles began popping up in forums and groups. Step 2: Find an influencer to spread doubts and questions "In the more successful misinformation cases that we see, there is always that gap of knowledge," she says. The lost opportunity for scientists became an opening for anti-vaccine activists, says Melanie Smith, former director of analysis for Graphika. "When you don't collect these data during the clinical trial, you really lose an opportunity to study it in a controlled fashion," Lu-Culligan says. Because there is so much natural variation in women's periods month to month, a controlled clinical trial would be needed to try and establish whether it was happening. Unfortunately, definitively establishing a link has proved difficult, in large part because trials for the new vaccines never asked women about their periods. The researchers learned many thousands of people who menstruate have unusually heavy flows after vaccination, and some older people also experienced breakthrough bleeding. One team of biological anthropologists is conducting a survey of experiences with menstruation and the vaccines, which has had over 120,000 responses so far, according to Kathryn Clancy, a researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "It's very plausible that you could have abnormalities to the typical menstrual cycle," she says. Lu-Culligan says that immune cells play an important role in menstruation, and so it is in fact possible that the vaccine could temporarily alter that process. candidate at Yale University who studies the immune system and reproductive health. Here then is the life cycle of a lie: Step 1: Start with a kernel of truthĪfter receiving the COVID-19 vaccine this spring, "a lot of women noted heavy menstrual periods," says Alice Lu-Culligan, an MD-Ph.D. Claims about fertility and the coronavirus vaccines go back to at least December, and fertility claims about other vaccines date back even further, in some cases decades.īut the events of earlier this year illustrate how misinformation can spread in a nonlinear manner with many different players adding threads to a web of false content. The events outlined here represent a major amplification event for this false information, but they're by no means the only source of lies about female fertility and the vaccine. Untangling Disinformation The Most Popular J&J Vaccine Story On Facebook? A Conspiracy Theorist Posted It
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