Are covid vaccines causing falling birth rates?
Substack writers have noticed that birth rates have fallen in some countries, in 2022. Here’s Igor Chudov blaming falling birth rates in Germany on covid vaccines. And here’s Alex Berenson looking at data from Singapore and claiming that vaccines have cut down birth rates.
There’s reason to be suspicious about any claim like this. Since the covid vaccines were approved there has been an endless stream of conspiracy theories about their effects, most of which didn’t turn out to be true. At first, people claimed the vaccines had killed 25,000 people. Then it was 150,000. Then it was 750,000.
Then, the claim was that vaccines would have a delayed effect and depopulate the planet. It was predicted that all the vaccinated people would die in 2021:
But, now it’s 2022, 4 billion people got covid vaccines, and the world remains as crowded as ever.
Conspiracy theorists have moved on. Now the claim is that the vaccines are still going to depopulate the world, not by killing people, but by sterilizing women.
Is there any truth to this new claim?
Vaccine Trials showed no fertility problems:
The covid vaccine trials done in 2020 did not recruit any pregnant women. But some women in the trials still got pregnant after they got the vaccine. We have data from the Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson vaccine trials:
For every vaccine, the pregnancy rate and the miscarriage rate are similar for women who got the vaccine or a placebo.
42 women got pregnant in the Pfizer vaccinated group, as compared to 47 in the placebo group. Births were also slightly lower for the Moderna vaccinated group (6 vs 7). You could argue that these numbers show a small impact on fertility. But more women vaccinated with AstraZeneca got pregnant, as compared to the placebo group (50 vs 43). By the same logic, you’d have to argue that the AstraZeneca vaccine increases fertility. More likely, all these differences are just random variations in small numbers.
The miscarriage rate is slightly higher in the AstraZeneca vaccinated group, so you could argue that the AstraZeneca vaccine causes some miscarriages. But it’s also lower for women vaccinated with Pfizer and Moderna. By the same logic, you’d have to argue that the Pfizer vaccine prevents miscarriages. Again, these numbers are too small for the differences to be statistically significant.
One number is significant and odd — the rate of miscarriages is twice as high for the AstraZeneca trial (32%) as compared to the Pfizer trial (15%). That difference is probably too high to be random. What’s happening there?
The natural rate of miscarriages is somewhere between 10 and 20%.
The Pfizer and Moderna trials showed miscarriage rates are around the normal rate, but the AstraZeneca number is abnormally high (for both the placebo group and the vaccinated group).
The AstraZeneca trial was done in various countries around the world. The data from those countries possibly includes abortions. Fertility researcher Vikki Male notes that:
These pregnancy losses potentially include terminations reported as miscarriages, because the participant lives in a country in which termination of pregnancy is illegal. If the data from these countries is excluded, the pregnancy loss rate is 21% with the control and 14% with the vaccine.
This might be evidence that banning abortion doesn’t work — women get abortions illegally and report these as miscarriages.
It might also be evidence that miscarriage rates are naturally higher in some countries than others.
Either way, the vaccine trials give no clear signal that there’s any problem with the vaccines and fertility.
I don’t want to dismiss the conspiracy theory without looking carefully. Let’s consider the ways it could still be right.
The pregnancy numbers for both Pfizer and Moderna are both slightly lower than the control group. If the mRNA vaccines somehow lowered fertility by only 5%, the difference would be small in these studies. You wouldn’t be able to prove or disprove it with these trials.
You could also argue that pharmaceutical companies are lying or manipulating the data.
You could also claim that the trials didn’t track women long enough, maybe the trials didn’t last 9 months to track each of these pregnancies. But most miscarriages happen in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and only 5% happen after 20 weeks.
Let’s check what happened in the real world data, to see if it’s any different than the trials.
2022 birth rates are up in some countries and down in others
Here are 2022 birth rates across the world, from BirthGauge:
Birth rates are not down in every country. They’re not down in every country that used mRNA vaccines. They’re up 2% in France, 4% in the US, 5% in New Zealand, 16% in Ireland.
Israel vaccinated earlier than most countries, birth rates are down only 2%.
Chile vaccinated with a mix of Pfizer and China’s CoronaVac. Birth rates there are up 9%.
Births are down in many European countries, though.
The worst is Ukraine, down 18%. Germany is also notably bad, down by 9%.
Here’s the German birth rate by month, from 2018 to 2022:
Births are seasonal, with a peak in the summer and a drop in the winter. Births were lower this year than the average winter.
To get a better look at the data, we have to adjust for the seasonality. For each month, I subtracted the average value pre-pandemic value for that month. Here are the “excess births” compared to average:
In 2021, birth rates go above average twice, in 2 big waves. Then there’s a big decline in births, which starts in January 2022.
Could that January 2022 drop have been caused by the vaccines?
9 months prior to that was March 2021. At that time, it was mostly elderly people getting vaccinated in Germany. The only women under 40 that would have been eligible for vaccines were doctors.
Most young women in Germany weren’t eligible for vaccines until June 2021. Even if every woman ran out and got vaccinated on June 7th, and the shot made them infertile, there wouldn't be any change until about March 2022.
In reality, young women got vaccinated over a few months, starting in June 2021. So any infertility effects that happened 9 months later would be spread out between March 2022 and May 2022.
Sometimes science is complicated. But here it’s simple: cause does not come before effect. Whatever happened in January 2022 wasn’t infertility from the shots.
What about miscarriages?
The births in Germany dropped 7 months after young women started getting vaccinated. So that wasn’t infertility, but it could still be miscarriages. Imagine every woman in Germany rushed out to get the shot in June, and some were already 2 months pregnant, and the miscarriage rate went way up for them, the birth rate would drop 7 months later.
It would be a large effect. We’re talking about 10 to 12% of pregnancies ending in miscarriages, to get a drop this big. The natural rate is only around 15%. So the miscarriage rate would have to almost double.
How can we be sure that didn’t happen?
There are a few reasons to think it didn’t:
1. It didn’t happen in other countries,
In places like France, the birth rate went up after the shots. Those would also need to see miscarriages double. If the vaccine is harmful, it should be harmful everywhere.
2. The timeline doesn’t match other countries that saw a drop.
Alex Berenson looked at data in Singapore. In that case he found it was 9 months between vaccinations and the drop in birth rates. That means that Singaporean women weren’t having lots of miscarriages at 2 months pregnant.
So, Alex Berenson’s conspiracy theory is about infertility in Singapore. Igor Chudov’s conspiracy theory is about miscarriages in Germany. If the vaccine is bad, it should have the same side effects everywhere.
3. We can look at the data state by state in the US.
Birth rates went up in the US, after people got vaccinated, so that’s already reason to think the shots aren’t dangerous. But, we can go further and ask, was there any difference in birth rates, between the states?
In some states, almost everyone got the covid vaccine shot. Vermont was the highest. Rates were lowest in Wyoming and across the deep South.
Then, we can look at what happened later, this is about 8 months after the shots were given out:
If the vaccine doubled miscarriages and caused a big, 10% drop in births, you should be able to see that in the data.
It didn’t happen. If anything, births went up more where more people got vaccinated.
4. We can look at Google search trends in Germany.
There’s no monthly data on the number of miscarriages in Germany. But, sometimes you can tell what health problems people are having, simply by looking at what they’re searching for on Google.
You can see the timing of the Omicron wave just from people searching for the word “fever”:
You can see several waves of the pandemic just from people searching Google because they’ve lost their sense of smell:
You can see every wave of the pandemic from people searching “covid symptoms”, though it’s less clear if that’s sick people searching or people afraid of getting sick.
If the miscarriage rate in Germany suddenly doubled in June 2021, you might think that more women would be searching for advice. You might think that someone would notice this dramatic change and write a news article about it. In fact, nothing happened:
What actually caused the decline in births in Germany?
Here are 3 possible explanations, from most to least likely:
1. A rebound after more births in 2021.
Birth rates in Germany were above average in 2021, with 2 waves of increased births. German couples got locked down for covid. Some of them decided to have kids earlier than they would have otherwise, since they were locked down. The peak of conceptions would have been around June 2020, with a second peak around February 2021.
Then there was a rebound with less births after that. Since a lot of couples had just had children during the lockdowns, less would have them in 2021. Birth rates were up across most of Western Europe in 2021, so we should expect to see this effect in many countries — couples had kids during the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, then things dropped below average in 2022.
It looks like the rebound worked the opposite way in some other places. Chile had 10% lower fertility in 2021 and 10% higher in 2022. Puerto Rico was the same. Ireland was the same: down 9% in 2021, up 16% in 2022.
2. Declining marriage rates.
Dating fell apart during covid lockdowns. Marriage rates went down across Europe, in 2020:
Less people started dating during the pandemic, more people stayed single. Also, less couples could get married because of pandemic restrictions on events.
Sweden was famous for having less lockdowns than the average country in Europe. But they still had restrictions on events like weddings and there was still fear of covid. Swedish people stopped going to restaurants, stayed inside more. Sweden had a 25% decline in marriages in 2020 and a 7% decline in births in 2022.
New Zealand kept covid under control during the pandemic through a combination of strict border controls and contact tracing.
Some people imagine New Zealand was a locked-down dystopia, but life was actually pretty normal, after the first few weeks.
This is June 13th, 2020, in New Zealand:
Other countries had to wait until vaccines arrived in 2021 to reopen everything, but New Zealand was able to do that in mid-2020 by keeping the virus under control.
Marriage rates in New Zealand didn’t see the same drop in 2020 that Europe did. And birth rates there went up in both 2021 and 2022.
3. Covid might have some effect on male fertility.
There have been some large studies done, studying the effect of both vaccines and covid on women who are trying to get pregnant. Here’s one study done in the US and Canada, tracking 2,000 women trying to get pregnant. Rather than having problems with fertility, the vaccinated women had a 6% better chance at getting pregnant than the unvaccinated women.
But this isn’t a randomized trial. Different people choose to get vaccinated or not. On average, the unvaccinated women in the trial were fatter, poorer, and less educated. The vaccinated women were thinner, richer, and better educated. All else being equal, they should have a better chance at getting pregnant.
In general, that’s true across the US. People in vaccinated counties are thinner, people in unvaccinated counties are fatter:
The average Republican county was 35% vaccinated and 40% obese.
This fertility study found no difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated men.
The study also looked at whether men and women had covid before trying to conceive. In that case, they found a short-term issue with male infertility and covid — for about 2 months after getting covid, men have a lower chance of getting a woman pregnant:
The error range is high, it’s possible this result isn’t significant. But this does fit with the results of 7 other studies which found that men have lower sperm quality for a few months after getting covid. This is likely just from having a fever, during infection.
So, it might make sense to see a brief drop in birth rates happen 9–11 months after there’s been a wave of covid cases, because men’s sperm isn’t performing well. The birth rate drop was January 2022, 9–11 months before that was February to April 2021. Did Germany have a lot of covid cases around then?
The case counts say no:
But the death counts say yes:
It’s possible that enough German men got infected in winter and spring of 2021 to cause a birth rate drop in early 2022.
But the timing isn’t quite right. The peak in German covid deaths is more like 12 months before the birth rate drop, not 9–11 months. And the 2022 birth rate drop would be seen in more countries around the world if this was the answer.
I don’t think covid is the main factor. I think it’s more likely the drop reflects changes in marriage and couple’s choices during the pandemic.
It would be interesting to gather monthly data for more countries and compare it against 9–11 month lagged case counts, to see if there’s a pattern.
The world peak of covid cases came with Omicron, in early 2022. If covid does lower male fertility, it’s possible there will be a brief worldwide drop in births near the end of 2022.
Worst depopulation plan ever.
Alex Berenson has been notorious for hinting that the vaccines are deadly without quite saying it.
Here’s an old clip of him on Tucker Carlson.
He’s not saying there’s a depopulation conspiracy. He’s just saying that lots of people are dying and we don’t know why. He’s “just asking questions”.
If there’s a depopulation plan, someone must be behind it.
The comments on Berenson’s video show who’s to blame:
The commenters are certain that the Jews are trying to kill people with vaccines. They think it’s unnecessary because the virus does not exist. And they’re angry that women have the right to vote.
This all makes perfect sense. Israel was the first country in the world to use the Pfizer vaccine, because the Jews wanted to depopulate themselves.
And then, because the depopulation wasn’t happening fast enough, Israel was the first country to approve a booster shot, to accelerate the process.
And despite all this effort, birth rates in Israel are only down 2% in 2022. If you see a headline about Israel approving another covid booster, that means that the Jews are still trying at this depopulation thing.
You’d think they’d just use a more deadly shot that kills you on the first try, but the Jews are sneaky, they’re playing the long game.
They don’t want to kill everyone, they only want to kill really obedient people that take multiple booster shots. They want a world full of anti-vaxxers or just people that only get 1 or 2 shots.
In the United States, conservatives are more likely than liberals to hold anti-Semitic views. So, naturally, the Jewish conspiracy gave out more vaccines to the liberals, to kill off the people that like them more.
The Jewish conspiracists don’t want an easy take-over of the world. They like to play on hard mode. They want to rule over a world full of gun-toting, anti-Semitic anti-vaxxers.
In summary, there’s not much evidence that covid vaccines have caused a drop in birth rates.
But that won’t stop people from worrying about it.
We’re not living in “Children of Men”, we’re living in a different movie:
We’re living in a world where scientists can create RNA vaccines to fight new diseases but some people choose to eat horse paste instead.
We don’t know all the effects that the pandemic will have on birth rates.
We do know that well educated people are having less kids than poorly educated people. We know that birth rates are lower in blue states and higher in red states, because people in red states are more religious and less intelligent. Over time, the US is only going to get dumber and fatter. I predict that writing conspiracy theories on substack will only get more profitable.
