Do HPV vaccines harm reproductive health?

Chemical engineer Brian Hooker claims that the HPV vaccine causes five times more menstrual, ovarian, and other reproductive health problems.

Hooker seems to be using an analysis of Florida Medicaid records. Medicaid is a health insurance program for people with lower incomes. These records can show what health problems doctors wrote down after a patient visit.

But this analysis does not seem to be clearly published or available for other experts to check. We could not find a peer-reviewed paper by Hooker that proves the “five times” claim or the claim that vaccinated girls had more HPV diagnoses. Nothing that other experts checked before the study was published seems to exist.

Health insurance records can show patterns, but they cannot prove that one thing caused another. As one article explains, “association and causation are not the same.” For example, they can show that a person got a vaccine and later had a diagnosis. But that does not prove the vaccine caused the diagnosis. This claim needs stronger evidence before it can be treated as reliable.

Large studies have looked at HPV vaccines and fertility, or the ability to get pregnant. These studies do not show that HPV vaccines cause the ovaries to stop working normally or as expected. Some research has even found that HPV vaccination may be linked to better fertility for some women.