TOPEKA — A pair of physicians said dangerous myths they’ve encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic include an assertion vaccines emerging to fight the virus made women sterile and manipulated a person’s genetic code.
Doctors Kevin Ault and Matthias Salathe, who work with the University of Kansas Health System in Kansas City, Kansas, said Monday that neither claim about vaccines was true.
Ault, who is an OBGYN, said there was no validity to speculation treatment for COVID-19 would prevent women from getting pregnant.
“We don’t see that in natural COVID infections so it’s kind of hard to believe a vaccine would cause that problem. That’s go-to misinformation about infertility and has been used for lots of vaccines,” he said.
Salathe, who is chairman of internal medicine in the KU Health System, said another strange claim was the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were designed to secretly alter a person’s genetic structure.
“Therefore,” he said, “you will be genetically altered and they can trace you with this,” Salathe said. “Obviously, this is not the truth. There is no genetic code that will be manipulated within your genome.”
He said both vaccines were effective and he would be willing to take the shot as soon as it was available to the public.
On Monday, Kansas health officials said testing identified more than 5,700 new cases of COVID-19 and 70 additional fatalities in Kansas had been attributed to the pandemic since Friday.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment reported that since March the state had racked up 174,025 cases of coronavirus, 1,856 deaths and 5,509 hospitalizations.
Steve Stites, who is chief medical officer of the KU Health System, said he was concerned the same people who were resisting the vaccine were the same folks who didn’t want to wear a mask. If so, he said, those individuals would be placed at the greatest risk for contracting and spreading the coronavirus.
“At some point,” Stites said, “you have to try to believe in rational science and not the mythology of the internet.”
