Pfizer and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines do not harm male fertility, according to a study that found that participants’ sperm levels remained at healthy levels after receiving two doses of mRNA prevention.
The study, published Thursday in the journal JAMA, recruited 45 healthy male volunteers aged 18 to 50 who were earmarked for mRNA Covid-19 vaccination by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
Participants were pre-screened to make sure they did not have any underlying fertility problems. People with Covid-19 symptoms or a positive test result within 90 days were excluded.
The men provided a semen sample after two to seven days of abstinence, before the first vaccination dose, and about 70 days after the second vaccination.
Semen analyzes were performed by trained andrologists according to World Health Organization guidelines and included semen volume, sperm concentration, sperm motility and total motile sperm count (TMSC).
“One of the reasons people are hesitant about vaccines is their potentially negative impact on fertility,” noted the authors of the study from the University of Miami in the United States.
“Because reproductive toxicity was not studied in the clinical trials and SARS-CoV-2 has been linked to a decrease in sperm parameters, we examined the sperm parameters before and after the administration of the mRNA vaccine,” they said.
When examining sperm parameters before and after two doses of a Covid-19 mRNA vaccine, there were no significant decreases in sperm parameters in this small cohort of healthy men, the researchers found.
The sperm concentration and total motile sperm count at the start of the study were 26 million / milliliter (ml) and 36 million, respectively.
After the second vaccination dose, the median sperm concentration increased significantly to 30 million / ml and the median TMSC to 44 million.
Sperm volume and sperm motility also increased significantly, the researchers said. Since the vaccines contain mRNA and not the live virus, the vaccine is unlikely to affect sperm parameters, they said.
The limitations of the study include the small number of men enrolled, the short follow-up period and the lack of a control group. The researchers also found that while semen analysis is the basis of male fertility assessment, it is an incomplete predictor of fertility potential.
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