ByMAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN

The Pfizer  coronavirus vaccine does not appear to have an impact on sperm, according to a first-of-its-kind Israeli study.

Researchers from Hadassah-University Medical Center collected data from 43 male patients undergoing in vitro fertilization between February and March 2021 – 29 with “normal” sperm and 14 with “impaired” sperm, explained Dr. Myriam Safrai, who led the study with Dr. Benjamin Reubinoff and Dr. Assaf Ben-Meir.
 

The team compared the sperm of each male subject individually against itself before and after vaccination.

“We saw no difference in the sperm parameters for all the groups,” Safrai told The Jerusalem Post.
The study was published on the preprint health research sharing site MedRxiv.

The researchers also ran a sub-analysis, specifically checking if there was potentially more impact from the vaccine on men whose sperm was already considered “weak” or impaired: There was none.

In contrast, several studies have found a significantly negative impact of the virus on sperm parameters.

“We know that up to 25% of men who have coronavirus will also have sperm impairment from the disease,” Safrai said. “Couples that want to conceive – we need them to vaccinate more.”

She added that a separate study she conducted previously showed that the vaccine does not impair female fertility either.

There is a lot of misinformation about vaccination, Safrai said. “It is important to share data and affirm for the population that there is no fertility impairment.”