Sperm Parameters After Covid-19 Vaccine | Hacker News Reader

Sperm Parameters After Covid-19 Vaccine

jamanetwork.com

39 pointscharlieirish48 comments

In 45 vaccinated men over ~75 days, roughly 3/4ths saw a sperm increase or no change, and 1/4th (12 of them) saw a decrease.

This is 1% interesting but its very odd to test 45 men and not also test 45 random men in the same age bracket. What if the count difference is an approximation of seasonal differences between December and April? For example, there is a lot more opportunity physical activity for people generally in April, especially with lockdown easing. Is this just measuring that? In other words, is a 3/4th increase-or-no-change, 1/4th decrease the norm in the population over that time period regardless of vaccines? Does sperm count go up more for unvaccinated people during that period?!

It's possible that other studies could tell us this, but from the public study information and graph it seems surprisingly myopic.

FOR EXAMPLE (note this is sheep, I found the same for boars too, but if someone has a good human graph please post. Note the benefit of other mammals is that there is no selection bias in who shows up to get tested for such things.): https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mean-monthly-sperm-conce...

Mean monthly sperm concentration in Dec and Jan: about 2600. In April, about 3400. That's a huge jump. What if that explains the entirety of these results? What if these vaccinated people have a lower than average variation! (And again, what if lockdown lifestyle changed things big time, and vaccinated people are doing more physical activity, etc etc.)

Like the bad Ohio State covid-19 athlete heart study[0], my cynical view is that the reason controls weren't included is because of the suspicion that the study would not be notable/publishable if they were.

[0] Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Findings in Competitive Athletes Recovering From COVID-19 Infection, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

I had fertility issues and my urologist showed me how sperm levels generally follow a wave pattern and taking the sample at the bottom and the top can have a very significant delta

Without a control group this is really not very useful.

Is that actually true when they’re just looking for a deviance from the baseline of all male humans? There’s a wealth of active and historical fertility tests they can reach for.

I haven't personally done any experiments in biology, but I believe control group'ing and randomization is so basic that if they haven't done that, they're probably not trying to seriously study the issue.

The purpose is to try to diminish a bunch of systematic errors in the setup of the experiment. Systematic errors lead to stupid wild goose chases of side effects of the experiments themselves, rather than actual interesting effects.

At least this is telling us that the difference is no greater than seasonal differences/whatever that might also be underlying.

Or, how about the subjects got better at collecting their sperm. Not a talent most of us have much experience at.

I'm a software developer. It has been years since I did anything even remotely scientific.

I do not like conspiracy theories. I do not adhere to any that I'm aware of.

Yet after reading the abstract, I'm left despairing. Just between the sample size and the glaring discrepancies in the sampling methodology before and after - so massive that they had to be mentioned in the abstract, and I'm left wondering who this is supposed to convince.

Sometimes conspiracy theory fighters are their own worst enemies.

This is not an axiomatic proof. It is a sanity check and for that it is sufficient.

If you require "convincing" in this instance then infact you do adhere. But that's okay.

> If you require "convincing" in this instance then infact you do adhere.

It is not a conspiracy theory to believe that a relatively untested vaccine can have unknown side effects. The FDA just added a heart inflammation warning a few days ago, for example.

>It is not a conspiracy theory to believe that a relatively untested vaccine can have unknown side effects.

Everybody knows that. But the benefits (reduced transmission, protection from severe forms of the disease) still outweigh the risks of the vaccine.

It's impossible to say what the risk/reward trade-off is, if all the risks aren't known.

That is nonsense. We approved it for emergency use based on a tentative analysis of the risk reward trade off. With hundreds of millions of shots given there is no particular reason to believe there should be ANY long term consequence of the covid vaccine and short term side effects are understood.

I don't know how you can dispute that if you are trying to compute A where A = B/C and you don't have a fixed value for B, then you cannot know A with any certainty. We're distributing novel vaccines treatments which have had zero long term tests. We are all in the middle of the worlds largest vaccine experiment. The final results will not be known for years.

Particularly there are actually plenty of reasons to believe there might be lots of long term consequences. Especially for coronavirus vaccines:

- previous attempts to make coronavirus vaccines often made people more susceptible to subsequent variants not less through ADE (antibody dependent enhancement) where the virus uses the immune system to infect more cells

- long term testing used to be an essential part of vaccine approval, presumably not for no reason

- distributing multiple novel vaccines increases the chance that a harmful one will have been distributed (albeit to fewer people than just administering one novel vaccine)

- distributing a vaccines during (not before) a pandemic almost guarantees increased virulence (much like administering incomplete courses of antibiotics promotes antibiotic resistant bacteria)

- unlike other vaccines, the active ingredient - the spike protein - is toxic. The vaccines make your cells produce this protein and it accumulates in bone marrow and especially the ovaries. The long term effect of this is to be determined

- vaccination can make the immune system hyperfocused on a specific variant, increasing vulnerability against other variants

There is also the issue of accute vacine injury, but I'll not go into that.

Immunology appears to be one of the most complex systems to try and contend with. I'm not an expert, but I worry that the 'tentative analysis' may have not been sufficient.

Hopefully it was the right decision to vaccinate the entire western world with novel vaccines. Time will tell.

"- distributing a vaccines during (not before) a pandemic almost guarantees increased virulence (much like administering incomplete courses of antibiotics promotes antibiotic resistant bacteria)"

This is not how the world works. It is a risk of incomplete vaccination but no vaccinations carry an even higher risk due to rolling 100x more dice.

There is no reason to believe vaccination against one variant makes you more susceptible to others your body already contends with a soup of microscopic invaders more extensive than known to man.

Each mRNA payload is a partial work product of a spike protein rather than plans for a factory which means that the quantity of the spike protein produced is too small to be harmful unlike getting covid which would produce plenty.

If we don't vaccinate most people you will eventually get actual covid within a few years. You are selecting between the certainty of getting covid and vaccination or if you are selfish between everyone else getting vaccinated and you getting covid. However if too many are selfish this strategy fails.

We have every reason to suppose our analysis is correct and we are preventing millions of deaths by moving forward now. This is a privilege we have never had before we would have gladly done the same in different places and times throughout history.

You need to either educate yourself more thoroughly or consider listening to the overwhelming consensus of highly educated people.

>I don't know how you can dispute that if you are trying to compute A where A = B/C and you don't have a fixed value for B, then you cannot know A with any certainty.

I'll argue that C, the benefits, are also unknown. What about the long term effects of COVID-19? What if a new more deadly, more infectious or vaccine-resistant variant appears that could have been prevented from a quick mass vaccination?

You can only make the best decision from what we know at this time.

> What if a new more deadly, more infectious or vaccine-resistant variant appears that could have been prevented from a quick mass vaccination?

The vaccine rollout could only ever proceed so quickly and we already have a 'vaccine-resistant' variants. So I agree the benefits look incredibly dubious.

Remember the so called vaccines don't even claim to stop people spreading or catching the virus. They only reduce rates of hospitalization. Vaccine is a misnomer. They should just be called therapeutics. They're doing almost nothing to stop the spread.

I don't think everybody knows that. I think a lot of facts have been brushed under the rug to convince more people to get the vaccine. I don't disagree about the benefits of the vaccine outweighing the risks (in many cases) but I don't think most people have the full picture.

The vaccine was normally tested for side effects. That's why it took so long.

The step that was skipped was the efficacy testing. Not safety testing. The efficacy was proved in the field.

You're incorrect. The accelerated timelines for testing the vaccines could not have allowed for the normal amount of safety testing: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/timeline

When you sign to get your vaccine it's clearly stated that long term side effects are unknown (at least in Europe). We can only hope it's gonna be ok.

It seems like a quick easy study, not trying to be more than it is. Why not gather some data before and after. That said, jama could do more to protect its reputation.

This is pretty normal. You have to run multiple studies before you can draw any conclusions. The studies start small, and if they find anything of note, there are bigger, more expensive follow-up studies.

This is a good reason why you shouldn't draw conclusions from just 1 study, or even 2 studies. You need a significant body of scientific evidence before you can conclusively say "X causes Y"

Sample size is small because research is expensive and done iteratively. Were it that an effect may be found, a larger study would probably be conducted to understand the exact effect. As such nothing of note was found, and this creates no incentive to conduct deeper research

Take with a grain of salt:

> The limitations of the study include the small number of men enrolled; limited generalizability beyond young, healthy men; short follow-up; and lack of a control group. In addition, while semen analysis is the foundation of male fertility evaluation, it is an imperfect predictor of fertility potential. Despite this, the study’s time frame encompasses the full life cycle of sperm.

Yes, in my opinion this study is too small and uses a too narrow sample of the population to matter. Not much to write about really

Table of results (45 men):

                             Before     After
    Semen Volume (ml)         2.2        2.7
    Concentration (m/ml)     26         30
    Motility (%)             58         65
    TMSC (m)                 36         44

In the 2010 WHO data (https://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/topics/infertility/co...)

    Percentile ml
     2.5       1.2 
     5         1.5
    10         2
    25         2.7 
    50         3.7
    75         4.8
    90         6
    95         6.8
    97.5       7.6

So these men had really low semen volume to start with.

The one thing I would note is that semen volume varies a lot over time. And so 45 men, taking two samples is really not a lot of data. My own data (samples 48 hours apart over a one month period) has median of 5.17 with IQR 4.91-5.84.

Results:

> After the second vaccine dose, the median sperm concentration significantly increased to 30 million/mL (IQR, 21.5-40.5; P = .02) and the median TMSC to 44 million (IQR, 27.5-98; P = .001). Semen volume and sperm motility also significantly increased (Table).

> Eight of the 45 men were oligospermic before the vaccine (median concentration, 8.5 million/mL [IQR, 5.1-12]). Of these 8, 7 men had increased sperm concentration to normozoospermic range at follow-up (median concentration, 22 million/mL [IQR, 17-25.5]), and 1 man remained oligospermic. No man became azoospermic after the vaccine.

I happened to have my sperm tested after getting Pfizer vaccine and they said that I had elevated white blood cell count in the semen.

Isn't there a lot of different factors? How long after? Were you fighting any other infections you weren't aware of? Tobacco, Marijuana, and Alcohol use can apparently all affect the count of white blood cells.

Maybe after the vaccine, they felt less intimidated to go out there and have sex with strangers, which affected their semen.

Now That's What I Call A Yikes! Volume 1117

???

So it did not affect sperm?

It did. It significantly increased individuals with testes' sperm concentration, volume, and motility. While it's important to wait for follow-up studies to confirm this, it's good news that yet another barrier to taking the vaccine has been broken.

EDIT: It appeared to have no effect, and the increase was likely not caused by the vaccine.

You cannot make that conclusion. You have a correlation the causation is not proven:

"While these results showed statistically significant increases in all sperm parameters, the magnitude of change is within normal individual variation and may be influenced by regression to the mean.Additionally, the increase may be due to the increased abstinence time before the second sample. Men with oligospermia did not experience further decline."

It is most likely the vaccine did not affect sperm parameters. The parameters happened to go up, but as the authors note, this was unlikely to have been caused by the vaccine. Several more plausible causes are noted in the study.

The main thing the study does is basically rule out a catastrophic negative effect on sperm parameters from the vaccine.

Although the results look good, I don't think you could draw this conclusion. It is just an indication, but only a proper study with control groups etc could lead to such a conclusion.

Edit: I see that the comment has been changed, but I will leave mine here anyway.

For men

Increasing women’s sperm count would have been a much more surprising finding, for sure.

but nowadays everyone can be a man, right?

For those scratching their heads and thinking this is just some kind of light humor thing, please bear in mind that the words "a woman's penis" and "people who have tested" and "people who chestfeed" are now parts of actual phrases used by government agencies in various parts of the world.

With respect to your unedited comment, how would scientific evidence that the vaccine interferes with reproductive function be good news for advocates?

"Conspiracy theorists" have been derided for months for being weary of its reproductive side effects but suddenly it's a positive if Science™ confirms it?

"Individuals with testes"?

How emasculating to have a key aspect of my genetics made optional.

I knew a guy who happened to have "testes" and was XXY, found out with fertility tests in the early 2000s. I think he Od'ed (on alcohol i guess?).

I also happen to just have met a girl (like two years ago? Friends' daughter) with "testes", XXY too except it was detected soon enough that she can have testosterone suppressant during her puberty that seems to help a lot for her impulse control (it was her demand). I think genetics are hard, biology is hard, and self-determination as a human being is even harder.

Don't think of this as emasculating and just a way some people want to talk. Honestly, no one gonna call you out if you say "guy" except maybe on twitter (look at the other posts on this thread), so please you don't have to act offended.

* emasculating

Thanks autocorrect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com