Covid Vaccines and Fertility: All You Need To Know

A comprehensive guide and resources for more information

A woman holds up a pregnancy test. Photo: Esparta Palma (Creative Commons License)

Since very early in the rollout of the Covid vaccines, rumors and worries about the vaccines affecting fertility have circulated. Like many of the questions people have had about Covid vaccines, this concern is a familiar one in the history of vaccines and vaccine hesitancy. Misinformation about vaccines and fertility has existed as long as vaccines themselves have, and concerns have periodically flared up over the years about specific vaccines, from the smallpox and HPV vaccines in the U.S. to the pertussis vaccine in Kenya. In fact, worries about vaccines causing infertility are such a common trope that they were featured in a fictional plot in an Amazon Prime Video TV show.

One possible contributor to this fear is that the vaccine clinical trials excluded people who were pregnant or nursing, which is fairly common in clinical trials (though multiple researchers have told me they disagree with it). Although 36 women did become pregnant during the trials, there were similar numbers of pregnancies in the vaccine and placebo groups.

Then the World Health Organization caused confusion and uncertainty by initially opposing vaccination during pregnancy even as American medical professionals were saying the benefits…