Why the scare quotes around "temporarily" in the HN title? The study shows that the change was transient, and its title does not include quotation marks. Putting scare quotes around the word "temporarily" is both unjustified and misleading.
That's an interesting hypothesis, but the linked article is not science news, it's an academic paper.
The title shown here is unfortunately editorialized, but the actual paper's title is "Covid-19 vaccination BNT162b2 temporarily impairs semen concentration and total motile count among semen donors".
I attempted to submit the link with its actual title, but unfortunately it just sent me to this thread. Aside from the title, this submission doesn't seem flagworthy to me.
If this were as thoroughly studied as we were led to believe, then we would already have known about this effect. And yet we're just not learning about it, which leads us to wonder...what else are we yet to learn about it?
At least that's my read on the use of the "scare quotes".
If you dig into the actual data cited in the paper, the assertion that recovery was demonstrated at T3 is dodgy at best. The study authors may have put some reassuring language in their commentary to get past political roadblocks to publication. I would not have added the quotes myself, but they're not necessarily misplaced.
“Systemic immune response after BNT162b2 vaccine is a reasonable cause for transient semen concentration and TMC decline. Long-term prognosis remains good.”
I expect a lot of salty comments in this thread, and a lot of downplaying (which is probably justified, it _does_ say that the effect goes away, and it may be that this happens after other vaccinations).
However, this is a thing that none of the many people who previously got this shot would have been offically warned about beforehand, right?
This is presumably one of the reasons why a lot of people were skeptical that giving something to a billion people and then waiting a few months was perfectly sufficient to make claims about long term safety.
The issue is not the effect on sperm, because as both you and I have pointed out, the paper says the effect subsides.
The issue is that when being advised (or browbeaten) to get this shot, you probably weren't informed beforehand that for the next 3 months your swimmers might not be in tip top shape. This might not matter to you or me, but maybe it would to couples that are trying to concieve, for instance.
It's not just that people weren't warned, it's that we were presented with a bunch of a priori reasoning about why mRNA shots couldn't possibly have this effect. So it raises the question, which of the other assertions (which were not backed by long term clinical data, because none existed) were also wrong?
Could somebody please help me understand table 2 on page 14? For the Sperm Concentration row, the value is -14.5% relative to reference on T1, -15.4% relative to reference on T2, and -15.9% relative to reference on T3. Where T3 represents the evaluation over 150 days after vaccination date. Is there a typo here; shouldn't T3 be closer to zero? Or was there a later assessment date that wasn't included in the table?
My initial reaction to this title was "Oh awesome, Pfizer used mRNA tech to create a male contraceptive". But this is actually about the vaccine causing this. Still, maybe we could use this to make an actual contraceptive?
There was a conspiracy theory about this. It was suppressed as a nonsense and miss information. I really find it very difficult to trust official authorities any more.
Yes, there was. There were early studies in rats showing that the lipid nanoparticles which the mRNA vaccines use concentrate in the ovaries and testes. There should have been biodistribution studies in humans before the vaccine rollout, but naturally those were skipped entirely. It was one of the biggest early red flags for me.