Vaccine “shedding” narratives targeted toward women
Authors: Kolina Koltai, Rachel E. Moran, Nicole Buckley, Divya Suresh Kumar, and Connor Klentschy (University of Washington, Center for an Informed Public) ; Kyle Weiss and Erin McAweeney (Graphika) ; Emma Dolan, Jennifer John, Ashwin Ramaswami, Carly Miller (Stanford Internet Observatory)
Key Takeaways
Last week, Virality Project analysts tracked the spread of an old anti-vaccine trope applied in a novel way to COVID-19 vaccines: “vaccine shedding”, or the claim that vaccinated people spread the disease for which they have been recently immunized.
While vaccine shedding is documented in certain types of vaccines, it’s impossible for US-administered COVID-19 vaccines to shed. Nevertheless, anti-vaccine activists are applying this trope as a vector for misinformation about the effects of COVID-19 vaccines on women’s health.
This is not the first misleading narrative that attempts to link women’s health issues and COVID-19 vaccines. Anti-vaccine activists and influencers have previously used the story of a doctor’s miscarriage and false claims about infertility to prey on fears.
These narratives have gained traction within the anti-vaccine communities where they originate, but also within the QAnon and “health and wellness” community, whose audience base may not have been exposed to the “vaccine shedding” trope in its prior incarnations.
The larger impact of this dynamic is that it opens the door for those with large platforms to talk about women’s health and vaccines generally— a large potential interested audience — and to introduce others to more sensationalized narratives.
One of the overarching dynamics of online misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines is that very little of it is new. Many of the tropes about efficacy, ingredients, safety, and others are quite old. However, recent claims alleging that women’s menstrual cycles were changing if the women were in the presence of others who’d recently gotten the shot, are novel. This narrative bubbled up in anti-vaccine communities, who have long discussed “vaccine shedding,” and was amplified in a recent tweet on April 20 by Naomi Wolf, an anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist who has repeatedly spread vaccine misinformation. Wolf tweeted last week that unvaccinated women were experiencing menstruation issues after being around vaccinated women.
This is just one of several posts by accounts with large followings in the past week who have raised concerns around women’s health after exposure to the COVID-19 vaccine.
Figure 1: A tweet from Naomi Wolf pushing the claim that being exposed to vaccinated people can cause menstruation issues.
This rapid response post addresses two claims about the vaccine which have recently garnered more attention:
Vaccinated people are causing medical issues (such as menstrual cycle changes) in unvaccinated women though “vaccine shedding.”
COVID-19 vaccination is linked to women’s health issues, including abnormal menstruation, infertility, and miscarriage.
The vaccine shedding trope is a novel addition to previous claims around women’s health and the COVID-19 vaccine. In this post, we provide background on the unsubstantiated narrative and discuss where it falters as an evidence-based claim. This debunking is important; our analysis of the spread of these claims shows that they are being leveraged by conspiratorial and anti-vaccine communities to amplify already-discredited stories.
The claims around “vaccine shedding”
Viral shedding, in which an individual with a viral infection produces more virus that can be transmitted to others, is a well-understood and ubiquitous biological mechanism by which viruses spread. “Vaccine shedding” claims allege that individuals who have been recently vaccinated shed those viruses following immunization. Vaccine shedding, however, can only be caused by live-attenuated vaccines (those with weakened forms of the virus that causes the disease); the oral polio virus and rotavirus vaccines are the only immunizations documented to have resulted in significant shedding. However, anti-vaccine activists sometimes point to rare instances of viral shedding in recipients of other childhood vaccines, such as MMR. These instances are so rare as to merit research papers— out of 50 million people who have received the chickenpox vaccine, for example, there have been 11 infections linked to vaccine shedding —but anti-vaccine activists allege that these examples of transmission are happening more frequently.
None of the three vaccines that have been authorized for emergency use against COVID-19 in the United States (Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson) are live-attenuated vaccines. Despite the biological impossibility of vaccine shedding from US-administered COVID-19 vaccines, anti-vaccine claims that individuals vaccinated against COVID-19 can negatively affect the health of unvaccinated individuals have gained significant traction.
What is particularly novel about shedding narratives around COVID-19 is that they are a departure from the shedding narratives we have seen in the past around other vaccines. Typically, we see this narrative being applied to people spreading the disease they are vaccinated for — the (false) claim that unvaccinated children are catching measles from recently vaccinated children, for example. However, when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccine, shedding narratives are not alleging the spread of coronavirus, but rather the spread of side effects — in particular.
Part of this claim has been rooted in promoting the idea that the mRNA vaccination technique can result in transmitting spike proteins through respiration. This spike protein has been previously used to promote the claim that the COVID-19 vaccine will cause sterilization in women. There is no evidence to support this claim.
The claims around women’s health
Vaccine shedding is not the first narrative that the Virality Project has observed that links COVID-19 vaccines to women’s health issues. This is also not Naomi Wolf’s first time linking the COVID-19 vaccine to women’s health issues.
Prior examples of anti-vaccine activists connecting the COVID-19 vaccine to women’s issues include content advising pregnant women to not get the vaccine based on misleading contextualization of VAERS data, anti-vaccine activists using a doctor’s miscarriage as proof of the vaccine’s danger to pregnant women, and stories of people losing their jobs because they did not want to vaccinate out of concern that it would affect their fertility. There are many variations of claims that vaccines are dangerous to women. Their impact is important, because sensationalized claims can cloud actual scientific findings, such as preliminary findings from a new study by Shimabukuro et al. (2021), that found that the proportion of adverse outcomes in pregnant women who had received the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine is comparable to those in published studies on pregnant women before the pandemic.
The difficult part in addressing these concerns is that not all of the supporting content is misinformation, or even false. As we covered in our rapid response post on the J&J pause, the concern about blood clots — a real potential side effect, the frequency of which was overstated — can degrade trust in the vaccine, particularly in women.
Analysis of the narrative and its promotion/spread
Despite the lack of substantial evidence, these misleading narratives linking vaccine shedding to menstrual cycle irregularities, or making claims about negative impacts to womens’ health more broadly, have gained traction not only within the anti-vaccine community, but also within the QAnon and health and wellness communities, whose audience base may not have been exposed to the “vaccine shedding” trope in its prior incarnations.
Videos have been a common way that Virality Project researchers have seen this type of narrative spread. For example, an Instagram video from a holistic women’s health advocate shared anecdotal claims that women were experiencing side effects of COVID-19 vaccines (both from actually receiving the vaccine and from exposure to vaccinated people) related to menstruation and fertility. The account argued that these side effects are evidence that the vaccines are a route to sterilization — another well-established anti-vaccine trope. The video, posted on April 16th and flagged by Virality Project analysts, received over 360,000 views. As of the publishing of this post, this video has been removed on Instagram but has been downloaded and shared across multiple platforms including YouTube.
Virality Project researchers have additionally noted Instagram accounts using Stories and Lives — ephemeral features of Instagram where images and videos can disappear after 24 hours — and long form videos on Facebook to spread these claims. For example, on April 20, Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson, a Canadian politician, posted a 2 hour long Live on her Facebook page that shared these claims about the COVID-19 vaccine and infertility; the video, which also discusses other claims about COVID-19 lockdown measures in Canada, presently has almost 20K views. Another video posted to an account with 11k followers on Instagram showed a conversation between anti-vaccine activist Maureen McDonald and Dr Lawrence Palevsky captioned “WTF is happening with women’s cycles Part 1”. It amassed 350,000 views just on Instagram, with thousands more views on Facebook, Telegram, bitchute and other platforms. These more fleeting videos, which are shared to other platforms, often do not have a fact check label on them. As of the publishing of this post, the Facebook Live video received a generic COVID-19 information label, and while the Instagram IGTV, “WTF is happening with women’s cycles Part 1” didn’t receive a label, the second video in the series received a “false information” warning label.
Figure 2: Long form video that was initially shared by Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson (left) being shared by anti-vaccination accounts (right).
On the far-right, conspiracy theory website InfoWars posted an article on April 15th claiming that it had “hundreds of testimonials” from women reporting “bizarre menstrual issues and even miscarriages after being physically close to people who had recently received their COVID-19 vaccination.” The InfoWars article, which claims these stories are evidence of a depopulation agenda perpetrated by “global elites,” got minimal engagement across the social media platforms. The article received a fact-checking label on Facebook but was not labeled on Twitter.
Figure 3. Left: A snapshot of the spread of the InfoWars article across Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter as of April 23, 2021. Right: An example of the warning label placed on the InfoWars article shared on Facebook.
At a wider glance, our team didn’t find any notable degree of misinformation about vaccine shedding and women’s health outside of these more fringe communities. In fact, on Facebook, the top post for “vaccine shedding” was a post debunking its connection to the COVID-19 vaccines (in Malay) by Dr. Suhazeli Abdullah, a physician and activist from Malaysia. Large media outlets such as ABC News, The Today Show, and others have discussed COVID-19 vaccines and menstruation, but did so neutrally, without amplifying the conspiracy theories embraced by the anti-vaccine community. Interestingly, none of the conservative media properties ran videos in the past 2 weeks related to “shedding” or the COVID-19 vaccine’s impact on “periods” or “menstrual cycle”.
Larger impact
While there is no evidence to suggest that being around people who have received the COVID-19 vaccine will cause issues to menstruation or fertility, has the potential to scare many women who might otherwise take the vaccine. While it is difficult to predict how much this claim will affect the general public’s trust in the vaccine, anti-vaccine narratives which have focused on fertility and women’s health have historically been resonant talking points. As the vaccine roll-out continues, health officials and research institutions are working to highlight potential side effects that impact women — with authoritative, accurate information. The CDC’s COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring has consistently tracked side effects for women, and will continue to detail differences in outcomes as more information is gathered.
Anti-vaccine accounts gain a veneer of authority by packaging more palatable claims, such as general concerns related to women’s health, with more outlandish claims, such as proximity to a vaccinated person shifting someone else’s menstrual cycle. We noted a similar dynamic in the packaging of the outlandish “mark of the beast” claim with that of vaccine passports earlier this month. The emotional response caused by a more unconventional narrative (e.g., shedding) can expose new audiences to the trope and give it greater consideration without providing any scientific evidence.