Kyle: There's an idea that's been floating around that the COVID-19 vaccines somehow impact human fertility. What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Seheult: Yeah. So it's come from many places. One place in particular was this idea that the antibodies made against the vaccine would crossreact with proteins in the placenta. So, let's go back and look at some of the data to see if actually this is happening or not. And you can see here I've got a table of the phase three trials in the four different major vaccines that are available. We have Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Janssen, which is the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. So, in the phase three trials, one of the specific exclusions for entering into the trial was the fact that you might be pregnant. So those were excluded, but, of course, you know, accidents happen. And so what we have here is a number of subjects in the phase three trials that became pregnant after enrolling in the study. And so while these aren't huge numbers, they just sort of give us a little bit of an insight. What you can see here is you've got the control group on the left, the vaccinated group on the right, and in all of these cases, the amount in the vaccinated group and the control group were the same. So if you look in the Pfizer vaccine, we had 12 pregnancies that occurred in the control group, 11 in the vaccinated group. We had seven pregnancies in the control group in Moderna and six. We had 9 in AstraZeneca and 12. Four in the Johnson & Johnson, and four in the vaccinated group. So, in terms of miscarriages, that was also looked at, and as you can see there, there was no statistical significant difference between either pregnancies or miscarriages at least in the phase three trials. Well, that's not where we have to leave it because we've looked at this now after the marketing, of course, so post-marketing, and there was a very good trial data that was published in the "New England Journal of Medicine" entitled "Preliminary Findings of Messenger RNA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety in Pregnant Persons." And what they looked at was a number of areas. They looked at pregnancy loss, spontaneous abortions, stillbirth, neonatal outcomes, preterm births, small size for gestational age, congenital abnormalities, and even neonatal death. And they compared the rates of people who have gotten the vaccine and were pregnant to the registry, so the V-safe pregnancy registry data, to see...which is what they got the data from and compared it to the published incidents of these occurrences. And what they found in every one of these cases is that there was no statistical significant difference in terms of what they saw in the pregnancy data versus what they should see in the regular population.

Finally, what I would say from my aspect or from my standpoint is to direct you to Dr. Viki Male who we've had here on MedCram and has a Twitter account who's actually updating this. She is a reproductive immunologist that has found it her duty to always constantly being updated in terms of data in terms of not just pregnancy, but also breastfeeding, in terms of getting pregnant, in terms of all of those risk factors. And I would highly recommend that you check her out on Twitter. But I'll be interested to hear what Dr. Patrick has to say.

Dr. Seheult: I'm just sort of adding on to the "New England Journal of Medicine" paper that you just referred to. There was a follow-up study. It's still a pre-print to my knowledge. And this study was done in around 2,500 people, and they were women specifically. They were given a COVID-19 vaccine before 20 weeks of pregnancy, and much like you mentioned with the study in the "New England Journal of Medicine," the miscarriage rate was on the low...within the normal range, and it was actually on the low end. So it was about 12.8% of miscarriages that occurred, and the normal range is between 12.5% to 18.7%. So, again, it was on the low end of the normal range.

There was another study that was published last June, and it was in the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. And that study found that neither having...previously had a SARS-CoV-2 infection or having had a COVID-19 vaccine affected embryo implantation. So, there was no effect on the ability of the embryo to implant into the uterus. On top of that, there was a very small study looking at fertility in men, and this study found that there was no effect of COVID-19 vaccines on any of the normal sperm parameters that are measured like motility, etc. Like there was no effect on that. So, I think, generally speaking, it seems as all the data so far points to no effect of COVID-19 vaccines on...no real, you know, large effect of COVID-19 vaccines on fertility.