By Hannah Claire Brimelow
More than 17,000 women in Spain reported being adversely affected by the COVID-19 vaccination in May.
Over 24,500 people who received the COVID-19 vaccination in Spain have reported suffering adverse events as of May 30. The majority of them – 17,408 – are women ages 18 to 64. Additionally, 4,117 men of the same age group were similarly affected. The study also indicated men and women over the age of 65 experienced adverse events following their vaccinations less frequently than younger people. Which vaccinations the impacted people received was not disclosed.
“A total of 26,227,825 doses of coronavirus vaccines had been administered in Spain” as of May 30, noted Statista in the report.
During May, Spain was set to receive “30 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech medication, 18 million doses of the Moderna, seven million of the Oxford-AstraZeneca and 17 million doses of the Janssen,” reported El País.
America’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention uses the term ‘adverse events’ to refer to health problems that occurs after vaccination.
A CDC report published May 14, 2021 on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine found three-quarters of recipients involved experiences systemic reactions to vaccine. This included “fatigue, headache and new or worsened muscle pain.” Additionally, “the frequency of systemic adverse events was higher in the younger than the older age” groups and “frequency and severity of systemic adverse events was higher after dose 2 than dose “ regardless of age.
Adverse events can include more dangerous patient experiences. This includes lymphadenopathy “in the arm and neck region” that lasted on average for 10 days. Recipients of the Pfizer vaccine also reported “appendicitis,” “acute myocardial infarction,” and “cerebrovascular accident.”
Swollen lymph nodes caused by the vaccination have interfered with accurate breast cancer screenings. Medical professionals recommend women over the age of 40 with an average risk of breast cancer get a mammogram every year. The swelling causes the diagnostic imaging, which was delayed for many women during lockdown, to result in false-positives across the country. Women have been advised to wait four-weeks after getting their second shots to go in for these early detection cancer screenings.
Another CDC study that monitored the first few months of vaccinations found that “over 79% of side effects were reported by women though just about 60% of the doses were administered to women.” Women were found be far more likely to experience anaphylactic shock and skin reactions than male vaccine recipients. The possible a negative correlation between estrogen and adverse COVID-19 shot reactions is not clear.
Dr. Vivek Cherian, an internal-medicine physician in Baltimore told Business Insider that vaccine side effects are even more pronounced for pre-menopausal women than post-menopausal women.
Across the globe, women reported disrupted menstrual cycles after being vaccinated. This includes 13,000 women in the United Kingdom who reported changes their cycles to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine all deny that the vaccine damages female fertility. Instead, doctors attribute the women’s experiences to an inflammatory response caused by the injections.
“That inflammation, has a potential or potentially can modulate estrogen response, which could be the link between certain women having heavy periods after the vaccine,” said Dr. Akshat Jain, a hematologist at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, to ABC7 News.
However, other physicians noted that vaccine makers did not collect data about menstrual cycles during randomized trials. This oversight means accurate information regarding the vaccine’s impact on women’s periods cannot be provided to the public.
“There’s a long history of us not doing a great job at studying women in research studies because of some of this complexity,” said UCSF OBGYN, Dr. Heather Huddleston. She specializes in reproductive endocrinology. “The train sort of left the station on that because we are now recommending the vaccine for everybody. So it will be very hard for us to generate a control group to answer this question.”
According to the Daily Mail, “women aged 18 to 34 having emerged as the group most likely to refuse the jab, with many citing fertility as their main concern — according to a survey of 55,000 Britons by market researchers Find Out Now in December 2020.”
Government and health organizations continue to recommend women take the vaccine despite their concerns and questions.
The Heritage Foundation pointed out that CDC data “show that Americans, regardless of age group, are far more likely to die of something other than COVID-19.” Over 93% of COVID-19 deaths in America are occurred in those over the age of 55.
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) July 13, 2021
“Since 11 March 2021, several European countries (including Denmark, France, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Spain, Sweden and The Netherlands) temporarily suspended the use of the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine amid reports of blood clot events and the death of a vaccinated person,” a study from Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute states.
This week, the American federal government flagged the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after reports of a rare pattern of Guillain-Barré syndrome was identified in several recipients. The condition, which impacts the nervous system, required hospitalization in most cases.
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