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Ask HN: Menstrual bleeding after Covid vaccine?
7 points by AnimalMuppet on Oct 5, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments
Can anyone comment on these two papers?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37738335/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9294036/

They're both published by NIH. I never heard anything about this.

Is this known by most everyone, and I just haven't been paying enough attention?

How significant is this? Is it within the bounds of "normal", or is it well outside it?



> They're both published by NIH.

One of them was published in Vacunas

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog?term=%22Vacunas%22[T...

The other was published in Science Advances

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog?term=%22Sci+Adv%22%5...

Noted on one of the pages:

> As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health.

I think an unfortunate number of people assume that because an article appears in the pubmed section provided by the NIH that it's somehow endorsed or published by the NIH. That's not the case.


My SO hasn't had a regular cycle after taking the first vaccine shot (Pfizer) way back when it became available.

It's slightly better now, but she used to have very regular cycles before.

She asked her GP and gynecologist about it and they both served some waffle about "we don't know why but nothing to worry about".

Like how can you say it's nothing if you don't know the cause...


It's not "totally without coverage":

2021-09: https://www.rcog.org.uk/en/news/rcogfsrh-responds-to-reports...

2022-02: https://www.vox.com/22935125/covid-vaccine-trials-menstrual-...

and there's a few more, but it hasn't been talked about much.

I heard the first anecdata reports right after the vaccines came available, not just women who were vaccinated, but their un-vaccinated coworkers, began to have unusually heavy, more frequent, and more painful periods.

The sum of the research I've read on it has been "yes this seems to be happening we should study it more," not that ive been trying to keep up.


They are not published by NIH. It is significant, it is not normal, but it's also not a public health emergency (compared to the benefits of vaccines).


Well, fine, they're on a website the NIH runs. I presume randos can't publish unsubstantiated junk there, so there's some level of these articles having passed through NIH's filters.


It's an index, not an endorsement. This is their disclaimer:

"This disclaimer relates to PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), and Bookshelf. These three resources are scientific literature databases offered to the public by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). NLM is not a publisher, but rather collects, indexes, and archives scientific literature published by other organizations. The presence of any article, book, or document in these databases does not imply an endorsement of, or concurrence with, the contents by NLM, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or the U.S. Federal Government."

The first one is published in Science Advances which is AAAS's open access journal, and they include other open access journals so, some of it will be unsubstantiated rando junk.


If you look at statistics of many countries that are heavily vaccinated, you will see the excess deaths have risen a lot. While countries that were not heavily vaccinated, don't seem to have risen (greatly) in excess deaths.

Here's a list of countries that had low COVID vaccination rates: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/these-countries-have-the-low...

And while correlation doesn't mean causation, I think it's too early to tell if the benefits of the vaccines outweigh the cost. Especially because looking into the cause of excess deaths is in many countries a political sensitive topic (meaning politicians are often not interested in funding such research). Politicians might say due to privacy legislation research is not possible [0].

As an example, compare some countries from the previous article in Our World In Data:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...

South Africa & Kyrgyzistan are low vaccinated countries for COVID, while the other countries have high vaccination rates. You will see the percantage in excess deaths have greatly increased in the highly vaccinated countries.

And another thing: excess menstrual bleeding could indicate some problem which might affect childbirth. It could mean in the long run more women could get issues with childbirth. Perhaps more premature deaths. But we can only know this in the long run. We do know the vaccines had not been tested on pregnant women, or in an extremely limited way. Right now (at least on Our World in Data) it seems hard to find data on fertility rate 2021, so I think it's still too early to tell if vaccines could negatively affect birth rates, but in a couple of years we should know.

Personally, if I'd wanted children (as a man who's not vaccinated against COVID) I'd look for an unvaccinated woman. This way I feel the odds are in my favour in getting a healthy baby.

Actually, my girlfriend got 2 vaccinations against COVID (we've got a 6-year-old daughter) and she told me last weekend she feels she the COVID vaccines made her unhealthy. She says she feels tired more quickly and she feels she gets sick more quickly as well.

At the time I told my girlfriend that I preferred her not getting the COVID vaccinations and she didn't really want to get them either, but she felt it would be harder to travel, so she decided to get them anyways.

She also knows of several people in the village who've had negative experiences after vaccination. One lady in our village got the Guillain-Barré syndrome and a close friend got several health issues (problem with his blood, minor stroke recently). There's more people with issues ...

Of course, this is all anecdotal evidence, but time will tell.

---

[0]: https://www.eur.nl/en/esl/news/searching-causes-excess-morta...


From your own links the vast overwhelming bulk of those countries with less than 33% of population fully vaccinated do not have health systems that can reliably report excess deaths, most of them are vey poor countries and a good number are undergoing civil unrest and conflict.

This alone effectively uncuts your argument.

Australia is a good place to look for vaccine side effects - the country has an excellent health reporting system that has been in place for many decades, it has a very high standard of general health and one of the highest global life expectancies - bad side effects would leap out in a country of > 26 million people almost all of whom have been COVID vaccinated multiple times.

So far the total is one fatality via Immune (idiopathic) thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) causally linked to vaccination.

Per 26 million this is significantly lower than the fatalities causally linked to covid while unvaccinated.

https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/covid-19-vaccines/advice-...


Did you really see it necessary to go off on a long diatribe merely because I said that the health benefits of vaccines outweigh the risks?

Did you also need to make a number of medically uninformed statements?

Did you also need to include all your anecdotes?

The long and short of it is that the medical establishment believes that the health benefits of COVID vaccines outweigh the risks. If you really want to tilt at that windmill, you'll need to make much more convincing arguments to get the establishment to change its mind.


Only the people in the medical establishment that are allowed to voice their opinion.

For example this renowned professor with hundreds of publications has been silenced. While he believes boosters are a very likely cause of recurring cases of cancer.

https://youtu.be/PnJ5T1Enwq4


Hardly a renowned professor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Campbell_(YouTuber)

Nurse practitioner who went of the deep end re: COVID with hundreds(?) of youtubes is closer to the mark.

For reference, actual "renowned professors" have bio pages that look a little more like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Stanley

Note the discussions about using population data to prove stuff, that's kind of a thing in epidemiology.


> Hardly a renowned professor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Campbell_(YouTuber)

I’m not talking about Campbell, but his guest in the video.

If you had looked even 5 minutes in the video, you would have known.


It is well outside it..that it is not getting the attention it deserves shows you the importance women’s health gets in the US.

I don’t know about other countries, but I have more than half a dozen of my female friends confirm this and I suspect this is not getting the attention it deserves. Because. Women are not believed when they go to doctors.

That’s all I am going to say. Even though I have more data.


Mind you, this got flagged but perhaps there are comments you'd be interested in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667936#37668125


The first paper suggests that there might be an issue based on mentions in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data.

The second takes this more seriously and looks to see if there is an issue by examing a wider set of data and studies, more or less concluding that sufficient evidence is lacking so far but perhaps further trials are worth pursuing.

This isn't a "womens voices are not heard" thing it's more of a "if there's anything there it is barely peaking above the noise" thing.

It's worth reading the conclusions of the second paper, keeping in mind how to read such papers, this:

    The primary limitation of this systematic review was a lack of data from randomized clinical trials investigating the effect of COVID-19 vaccines on the menstrual cycle.

    Most surveys included in our analysis were performed in the US, UK, and Norway, which are countries belonging to the ‘Global North’ in terms of health access and utilization by women, due to which, their findings cannot be extrapolated to the rest of the world, particularly countries with low healthcare access and resources such as Pakistan and India, where smartphone apps used for collecting and tracking menstrual data by users may not be as prevalent as they are in the countries where the studies were conducted.

    With a lack of peer-reviewed evidence from South Asia, which includes population centers such as Pakistan and India, it cannot be stated with certainty whether COVID-19 vaccination would have similar low reported menstrual abnormalities. 
highlights that overall, with app based menstrual tracking, there are low reported menstrual abnormalities (largely being that for a few women, cycles run a day late).

Data science wise the issues are; How often does this happen (sans COVID or vaccines), How much does stress play a factor (the stress of being concerned about the vaccine (which is a real thing)).

The conclusions are that "more study is needed to say anything definitive, throw money our way", which is a reasonable request and one common to many such papers - bear in mind there is no obvious smoking gun here so no immediate need to panic.

As a note about VAERS - consider routine haircuts, now scare the pants off of everybody about haircuts and open a Haircut Adverse Event Reporting System database for anybody to add theor stories to.

The reports of eveybody who died, injured themselves, got the runs, had cramps, etc. within a week after their haircut will mostly be real .. the data science challenge is to pick out how many of these events are related to the haircut and how many are statistically "as expected".




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