Women and the Covid-19 Vaccine: What You Need to Know - The New York Times

News that six women developed a rare blood clotting disorder after receiving Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine has prompted new questions about whether vaccines affect women differently than men, and whether there are special considerations that women should take into account when getting vaccinated.

Federal health agencies on Tuesday recommended that practitioners pause administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after a half-dozen women developed a rare blood clotting disorder about two weeks after vaccination.

In Europe, it initially appeared that women were at greater risk for blood clots associated with the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, which has not been authorized for use yet in the United States, but it turned out that more women were getting the vaccine overall in some countries.

Geeta Swamy, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and a member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’s Covid vaccine group.

Fertility patients who are scheduled for procedures like egg retrieval, embryo transfer or intrauterine insemination are advised to avoid getting a Covid vaccine within three days before and three days after the procedure, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

In addition, many medical providers may not allow a patient who is experiencing Covid-like symptoms into their facility, even if it’s likely that the symptoms are from a vaccine and their Covid-19 test is negative.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in a statement on Tuesday that for the time being, pregnant and postpartum women who want to be vaccinated should be encouraged to get either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shots, not the Johnson & Johnson vaccination.

“It’s unlikely that the Covid vaccine would affect menstrual cycles, and there’s no plausible biological mechanism by which this would occur.

Louis, to survey women on short-term vaccine side effects related to the menstrual cycle.

A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published in February, examined the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines and found that 79 percent of the side effects reported to the agency came from women, even though only 61 percent of the vaccines had been administered to women.

It could be that women are more likely to report side effects than men, said Dr.

If women are in fact having more side effects than men, there might be a biological explanation: Women and girls can produce up to twice as many antibodies after receiving flu shots and vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella (M.M.R.) and hepatitis A and B, probably because of a mix of factors, including reproductive hormones and genetic differences.

reported that most of the anaphylactic reactions to Covid-19 vaccines, while rare, have occurred among women.

And in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine describing the experiences of people who had redness, itching and swelling that began four to 11 days after the first shot of the Moderna vaccine, 10 of the 12 patients were women.