Dr. [Michelle] Rockwell, an Oklahoma-based family physician… saw that someone had made a collage of two of her Instagram posts from months earlier: one in which Rockwell was celebrating getting the COVID-19 vaccine, and another in which she was sharing the sad news of her miscarriage. Whoever made the collage had labeled the photos with dates suggesting that the miscarriage happened a few days after she’d been vaccinated—the implication being that the vaccine had caused her to lose her baby.
“I looked at it and I was just in disbelief,” Dr. Rockwell says—not least because the narrative wasn’t true. She had miscarried three weeks before she got the vaccine.
Stories like Dr. Rockwell’s illustrate that the scary warnings are sometimes intentionally fabricated and spread to misinform the public. Yet women are, nevertheless, believing them. In an April 2021 survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in five Americans said they believed or were unsure whether the COVID vaccines cause infertility… Experts suspect that these kinds of misguided fears are at least partly to blame—and that numbers won’t rise significantly until we find a way to successfully counter them.
