A widely shared blog post claims that 920 women have had miscarriages as a result of receiving COVID-19 vaccines. However, officials in Britain and the United States told Reuters there is no evidence of an increased risk.
The headline of the post, first published on a US blog site and later copied to a UK-based site, reads: “920 women have lost their unborn babies after being vaccinated.” The same text has also been shared on the social network Reddit and on Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CPrtZS8NYhA/
These posts claim that hundreds of women have suffered miscarriages “as a result of” or “due to” receiving doses of COVID-19 vaccines. These claims are purportedly based on data in the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the UK Yellow Card system – systems used to report suspected adverse drug reactions.
However, the claims published in the posts appear to demonstrate a misunderstanding of VAERS and Yellow Card data, as officials told Reuters that there is no evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between COVID-19 inoculation and spontaneous abortion.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told Reuters in an emailed statement that as of June 7, there had been 548 VAERS reports of women having miscarriages after receiving a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. But that number is among 2,224 VAERS reports of pregnant women who received a vaccine.
The spokesperson emphasized that the VAERS reports did not confirm the side effects; instead, they indicate that the miscarriages were caused by incidents of a different nature that occurred after the vaccination. The representative also said that this percentage of miscarriages is related to those that occurred earlier, before the vaccination.
“VAERS does not collect information on the number of pregnant individuals vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines, so it is not possible to estimate the rates or likelihood of an adverse event,” they said. “Although some reported adverse events may be caused by vaccination, others are not and may have occurred by chance.”
In Britain, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which oversees reporting under the Yellow Card scheme, gave a similar response.
"There is no model that argues for an increased risk of miscarriage caused by COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy," a spokesperson told Reuters, adding that miscarriages occur even under normal conditions at a rate of 1 in 4.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-health-coronavirus-idUSL2N2NP1RJ