Photo: Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP via Getty Images A few weeks ago, my exceptionally regular period was so late that I took a pregnancy test — and I had my tubes tied after my second kid.
When I read about periods in news stories and on well-respected health websites, including ones belonging to official agencies, someone always suggests that what this really might be all about is stress. While there is evidence that stress has an effect on menstruation, there’s an undeniable undertone of condescension here. It’s coded, you-might-be-a-little-crazy language that summons the idea that women are overly emotional and unstable, especially when it comes to that time of month.
The distrust born of refusing to fully engage with the question of how a new vaccine might affect female bodies by failing to track menstrual changes post-vaccination in clinical trials and instead pointing to a psychosomatic cause for period weirdness not only enrages women like me, it actually fuels the vaccine hesitancy it seeks to avoid.
At least two studies are gathering data on periods and the vaccine. Two scientists, whose questions arose in a very similar fashion to my own, started their own research project after one of them tweeted about her own period weirdness and it went viral. Another study at the University of Arizona began this past May, specifically tracking self-reported menstrual experience in a subset of participants in a larger, longer-running study of the effects of the pandemic on health.
annalieseg You started out right. That vaccine is indeed designed to make people like yourself sterile, and also cause reproductive system cancer at a younger age. Probably should’ve stuck with that. But no, you went Yay vaccine and the feminist route.
annalieseg I get this is anecdotal but I've had this. I just turned 45 and had both jabs a few months before. I was tracking my cycle for ivf and noticed an immediate change. From consistently 28 days my whole life it's varied between 25 and 32 days immediately following the 1st jab.
annalieseg A friend brought it up to me that some people’s cycles were affected by the vaccine. I offered that many never talk about their periods, or stool movements, or many other things