Why do some people think that the COVID-19 vaccines shed?
The usual suspects…
SARS Wars – Return of the Shedder
From Larry Palevsky and Sherri Tenpenny to Leila Centner, we know most of the folks who are pushing the myth of shedding with COVID-19 vaccines.
But where did it get started?
How did it get started?
No, it didn’t start with Naomi Wolf…
And the talk of shedding didn’t even start with reports of women having bleeding or clotting after getting vaccinated or being around someone who had recently been vaccinated.
It was folks simply worried about shedding…
And then folks using misinformation and propaganda about shedding to justify their not choosing to get vaccinated and protected.
So the idea of shedding got started in Facebook groups about COVID-19 vaccine side effects?
It certainly helped prime a lot of these folks to believe that shedding was behind new reports of COVID-19 side effects. Well, not new reports of known side effects – reports of possible side effects from the MHRA Yellow Card Scheme in the UK (like VAERS in the US).
What side effects?
Miscarriages.
As in VAERS though, there are no reports of signals from the MHRA Yellow Card Scheme to suggest an increased risk of miscarriage from COVID-19 vaccines!
This all merged with another phenomena…
Some women were reporting irregular periods after having their COVID-19 vaccines! Just like many women were reporting irregular periods during the COVID-19 lockdowns…
While this is perhaps a real side effect, there soon came reports of lots of other women having irregular periods who had not been vaccinated.
Why?
Shedding of course!
The anti-vaccine community had been talking about shedding for months already though, well they always talk about shedding…
But now they had a way to tie this to their propaganda that placenta proteins are similar to spike proteins and could cause infertility!
And that the COVID-19 vaccines are a bioweapon that are being used to sterilize everyone???
Of course, none of it really makes any sense, except maybe that recently vaccinated women are having irregular periods. That might be a real thing that is being further studied.
So now we have this perfect storm of people who are scared about COVID-19 vaccine side effects and shedding, with others jumping in to take advantage of those fears to push wild conspiracy theories.
All the while we are still in the middle of a life-threatening pandemic that will only be stopped if more people get vaccinated and protected. A pandemic that has killed millions of people and continues to flare up wherever it can.
Can we stop any of it?
One thing is for sure. We can’t stop these kinds of myths if we don’t know where they are coming from…
Did the idea that shedding was affecting the menstrual cycles of some unvaccinated women start organically as some of them talked about it? Almost certainly not. The myth of shedding as always been there and it took off in anti-vaccine groups on Facebook and Instagram, aided by conspiracy theory videos from the usual suspects.
More on COVID-19 Vaccine Myths
- Is a Doctor Refusing to See Vaccinated Patients?
- Did the Pfizer COVID Trials Warn Men to Stay Away from Pregnant Women?
- Fact Checking the Centner Academy Letter to Parents and Teachers
- Vaccines and the COVID Surge in India
- About Those Urgent COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Warnings
- The Truth About COVID-19 Vaccines
- I’m Not Anti-Vaccine, I Just Don’t Believe in the COVID-19 Vaccine
- More Questions to Help You Become a Vaccine Skeptic
- The COVID-19 vaccine and menstrual irregularities.
- The COVID-19 vaccine is a vaccine, not a spell.
- “The vaccinated are a danger to the unvaccinated because of shedding!”: The latest COVID-19 antivaccine disinformation
- Countering Geert Vanden Bossche’s dubious viral open letter warning against mass COVID-19 vaccination
- Shedding: An antivax trope resurrected for COVID-19 vaccines
- Spike Proteins, COVID-19, and Vaccines
- COVID-19 vaccine shedding – another anti-vaccine myth to scare people
- The Doctor Carl Sagan Warned Us About
- Fact check: Bloggers wrong about COVID-19 vaccines causing miscarriages
- Fact check: No, interacting with a vaccinated person won’t cause miscarriage or menstrual changes
- Fact Check-COVID vaccines do not ‘shed’ from one person to another and then cause reproductive problems
- Fact Check-COVID-19 vaccines are not infectious; you can’t transmit the vaccine to an unvaccinated individual
- Fact-check: Is fertility, menstrual cycles ‘affected by being around’ vaccinated people?
- No, there is no evidence that spending time around vaccinated people causes death or disease
- Covid-19 vaccine does not make people dangerous to others
- No, COVID-19 vaccines do not ‘shed’
- Can the vaccine make your period worse? These women say yes.
- Some Vaccinated Israeli Women Report Irregular Menstrual Cycles, Bleeding
- Here’s Where That COVID-19 Vaccine Infertility Myth Came From—And Why It Is Not True
- Fact Check-Canadian company is not changing life insurance policies to negatively affect those who get vaccinated against COVID-19