A new study, written and widely circulated by anti-vaxxers, suggests that some unvaccinated women reported experiencing menstrual irregularities after being near COVID-19-vaccinated individuals, possibly due to environmental exposure.

The editors of the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, the journal publishing this study, include a linguistics Ph.D., a professor of ophthalmology, and several people known for promoting vaccine misinformation. This journal isn’t taken seriously because the people accepting and reviewing papers do not have the background or expertise needed to make good decisions about them.

The study has several critical problems that should make you distrust it. First, it relies on self-reported data from people asked through social media and anti-vaccine groups to provide responses. Everyone in the survey had experienced menstrual abnormalities and had been looking for a cause.

This survey sought to compare the difference between those directly and indirectly exposed to COVID and/or the vaccine. By Spring of 2021, roughly half of all adults in the country had received at least one COVID vaccine, so most people would know or encounter at least one vaccinated person in their lives. So, this study has no proper control group of women who were not exposed to vaccinated people, making it impossible to show that the vaccine was the cause or to see how often symptoms happened.

The most important point is that there’s no clear scientific explanation for how being near vaccinated people could cause menstrual changes. The study mentions “vaccine shedding,” but there’s no proof that mRNA vaccine components can spread this way.

Because of these problems, the study’s results should be viewed with serious doubt and not taken as reliable proof of any connection between being close to vaccinated people and menstrual changes.

An anti-vaccine tweet claims that COVID vaccination in childhood increases the risk of cancers over a person’s lifetime.

Vaccines do not change our molecular structure or DNA. Dr. Paul Offit explains that it’s virtually impossible for DNA fragments in COVID mRNA vaccines to cause harm, such as cancers or autoimmune diseases. He outlines three protective mechanisms in our cells that prevent these DNA fragments from causing harm: the cytoplasm’s immune mechanisms and enzymes destroy foreign DNA; the DNA fragments lack a necessary signal to enter the nucleus; and they also lack the integrase enzyme needed to integrate into our DNA.

There is no scientific evidence or plausible mechanism suggesting that these DNA fragments would alter our genome to cause cancer. No evidence supports the claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause so-called turbo cancer or any other form of cancer.

The idea that these turbo cancers are a result of vaccines stems, in part, from claims that doctors are seeing huge spikes in cancer rates. However, even some of the most powerful carcinogens can take years to manifest in the form of cancer. While there has been an increase in early-onset cancers (not turbo cancer), this increase started in the early 1990s, well before the introduction of COVID vaccines.

Vaccines are not shown to cause cancer, and anti-vaxxers have yet to produce credible evidence the vaccine is causing cancers, turbo or otherwise.

Read more of our posts debunking claims about COVID vaccines and cancer.

In an interview with Alex Jones, Judy Mikovits claims that vaccines were made to cause harm and accuses medical and government organizations of being corrupt, saying vaccines don’t actually help people build immunity.

Mikovits claims that all vaccines since 1992, including Hep B, are XMRVs – xenotropic murine leukemia viruses, which is completely false. Hep B is a subunit vaccine, meaning that the antigen is made of tiny pieces of the surface proteins of the Hep B virus. It doesn’t include DNA or anything resembling a virus in full. These tiny pieces cannot enter cells, let alone the nucleus of cells, to change your DNA or cause cancer. And to another of her points, there is no credible evidence that COVID vaccines are causing cancers.

Another problem with her claims is conflating HIV/AIDS with COVID. AIDS is acquired immune deficiency syndrome and specifically refers to the final stage of disease caused specifically by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). It is not caused by COVID vaccines or anything else that isn’t HIV.

HIV is a virus that can be tested for and observed. Without HIV, there is no AIDS diagnosis. While she claims that COVID vaccines trigger HIV, they are two very different viruses. mRNA for the spike protein of one virus cannot make an entirely different virus grow.

Vaccines induce immunity in much the way germs do. An antigen (in this case, a piece of the germ, either on the germ itself or introduced as part of a vaccine) is introduced to your body. You create an immune response and learn to recognize the antigen so that the next time it shows up, the immune system can respond faster, often before you get sick.

Vaccines have prevented disease and saved countless lives since their introduction. Since 2000, measles vaccination has prevented about 60 million deaths worldwide. Smallpox, which had been around for millennia was eradicated through vaccination.

Vaccines undergo years of research and testing before being approved. International organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) track vaccine success, showing steep declines in disease rates after vaccination campaigns.

Claims that vaccines are harmful or designed to cause illness are contradicted by decades of scientific research, real-world success stories, and the fact that millions of lives have been saved. Vaccines are one of the most important medical breakthroughs in human history, improving life expectancy and reducing global suffering through science and cooperation.