Pfizer's primary mRNA injections “temporarily” impair semen concentration | Hacker News Reader

Pfizer's primary mRNA injections “temporarily” impair semen concentration

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

51 pointsAnonymous427231 comments

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.

Because the point of posting these articles is to keep an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust around science and COVID vaccine in particular.

Scare quoting temporarily plats into a particular irrational belief that COVID vaccination (maybe all vaccination) renders American men sterile.

Were you aware of this effect before reading about it here? I wasn't.

Could that have maybe been a reason for posting it?

The addition of scare quotes makes me say "no, that's not a good reason". If it were just science news, it wouldn't have them.

This particular post is just to promote suspicion about science and COVID vaccine.

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.

i copied it directly from disclosetv, who had it like that

Forget the scare quotes, that isn't even the fucking title.

> T3 evaluation demonstrated overall recovery.

Thus, the editorialized scare quotes seem to be misplaced.

The op did the same thing here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30306904

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.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/pfizer-vaccine-effects-on...

“Systemic immune response after BNT162b2 vaccine is a reasonable cause for transient semen concentration and TMC decline. Long-term prognosis remains good.”

This. Any source of systemic inflammation does this. It would be no different if you had a cold or an autoimmune disorder.

Wouldn't this mean that other vaccines as well as colds, the flu, and COVID would all be likely to do this?

Yes but it’s not as effective of a headline if you’re trying to drum up outrage from the double digit IQ club.

Everything is about clicks.

Yep.

People also forget that Guillain-Barre syndrome is more common after ordinary infections than vaccinations.

In many cases much more permanently

The scare quotes in the headline are not reflected in the article and seem not in line with community standards.

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.

Interesting how you are trying to create issue from something you have acknowledged [1] is not issue.

[1] > it _does_ say that the effect goes away

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.

Does that make sense?

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?

Was this really essential to research now. The conspiracy nutters are going to eat this right up.

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?

Would have been helpful to compare against flu vaccine

Could this be exploited, and could we finally land on a male 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.

Was there any evidence at that time to support the conspiracy theory?

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.

One more hypothesis (also called conspiracy theory in non academic venues) that turned out to be true.

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