Marcie Smith Parenti

The GrayZone

Amid rising reports of vaccine-related menstrual disruptions, the CDC and FDA are dismissing women’s concerns and denying them information while corporate media pathologizes them in sexist fashion.

This August 11, the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) overhauled its COVID-19 vaccine guidance for pregnant women, now “urging” them to accept their shots.

Just 23% of pregnant women in the US have received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Only something like 11.1% have been fully vaccinated.

The CDC is seeking to drive these numbers up, but it is not doing the one thing that would, perhaps more than anything else, assuage the “hesitations” of these so-called “anti-vaxxers”: investigate and explain widespread reports of menstrual disruption post-Covid 19 vaccine – and, if necessary, add a warning about it.

Why?

I have five female friends who, after receiving Covid-19 vaccines, experienced disruption to their menstrual cycles. Their symptoms have included hemorrhagic bleeding lasting more than a month; heavy intermittent bleeding for four months; passing golf-ball size clots of blood; and extreme cramping, serious enough to land one friend in the ER.

Most of these women are in their 20s and 30s, and at least one of them thinks she might want to have children. She now worries that her symptoms might be the harbinger of long-term fertility problems. At least two of my friends have symptoms that have not resolved. All are feminists and have throughout the years been consistent Democratic Party voters.

Other women of childbearing age have reported becoming temporarily “postmenopausal” after their second mRNA shot; conversely, women in menopause are reporting suddenly beginning to bleed again; trans men on hormone therapy have also reported sudden bleeding. Apparently, the number of vaccinated women around the world reporting alarmingly disrupted menstruation is, to be conservative, in the tens of thousands.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), however, does not warn women who get the shots that they may experience a disrupted menstrual cycle.

Why is this? In part because even though menstruation is sometimes called the sixth vital sign and directly implicates fertility, and the fact that women on average suffer higher rates of adverse reaction to vaccines of all sorts and medication in general, the effects of Covid vaccines on women’s health specifically, including the menstrual cycle, were not studied as part of the Emergency Use Authorization process.

[…]

The fact that there is no warning, nor any urgent research into whether there should be a warning, seems jarringly sexist when you consider that the FDA has established and does warn that the mRNA Covid vaccines may cause rather trivial short-term side effects including the following: rashes, itching, hives, injection site pain, tiredness, headache, muscle pain, chills, joint pain, fever, nausea, swollen lymph nodes, diarrhea, vomiting; plus the recently added and potentially lethal conditions myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the lining outside the heart), which primarily affect young men.

In other words, the FDA sees fit to warn that you might get itchy after the shot but has not deemed it important to determine, and if necessary, tell women – women who might be trying to conceive – that getting the shot could, at least in the short term, scramble their cycle.

[…]

The severity of COVID-19 does not negate women’s need for a rigorous and trustworthy scientific appraisal of the benefits and risks they face if they accept a COVID-19 vaccine.

[…]

Instead, women concerned about the health effects of Covid-19 vaccines have been subjected to 1950’s-style dismissals and demonization in blatantly sexist terms that stand at odds with #MeToo era calls to “believe women.”

Zero published studies on the effects of Covid vaccines on women’s reproductive systems

By early spring 2021, anecdotal testimonies of sudden, early, disturbingly prolonged, abruptly absent, extremely painful, or unusually heavy and clot-filled menstrual cycles post-Covid 19 vaccination were circulating on social media. By May 17th, the UK’s Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency had received 4,000 reports of post-vaccine menstruation disruption. By early July, that agency had received 13,000 such reports. Similar reports emerged from other countries like Canada and India.

In the U.S., adverse reactions to vaccines are tracked by the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which was created in 1987 and is co-managed by the FDA and the CDC. As of July 26, VAERS showed many thousands of reports of various menstruation disorders, most related to mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.

There had been 1,624 reports of “menstruation irregular” logged; 1,352 reports of “menstrual disorder”; 563 reports of “menstruation delayed”; 803 reports of “vaginal hemorrhaging”; 239 reports of “postmenopausal hemorrhage”; 95 reports of “hemorrhage urinary tract”; 57 reports of “abnormal uterine bleeding”; and 41 reports of “hemorrhage in pregnancy.” Even more seriously, there were 691 reports of “abortion spontaneous”; 88 reports of “fetal death”; and 25 reports of “stillbirth.” The CDC claims rates of miscarriage by vaccinated women is within the normal range.

[…]

Via https://thegrayzone.com/2021/08/13/cdc-fda-women-covid-19-vaccines-menstrual-disruption/