Have you heard the one about the coronavirus vaccine and heavy bleeding? No? Well, let me fill you in on a bloody good story. It all started when a former student of mine, who’s now a professor, asked if I knew anything about breakthrough bleeding with the vaccine. I hadn’t, but two weeks later, after getting my first dose, I was swapping out overnight pads every hour. I decided to ask on Twitter if anyone else had experienced changes in their periods since getting the vaccine, and the response was like a floodgate had opened. It seems heavy bleeding is the new side effect that nobody warned us about.

We expected around 500 people to respond to our survey, but we were bowled over when more than 165,000 people shared their menstrual woes. Turns out, changes in menstruation aren’t just uncomfortable but also often painful. People described bleeding through their clothes at work and fearing they had cancer. You know things are bad when you’re arguing with your doctor, trying to convince them that you’ve bled so much that you actually expelled your IUD into the toilet!

Now, let’s be clear here. Vaccines save lives, and the coronavirus vaccines reduce the risk of severe illness and long covid. I’m all for more access to boosters and global vaccine equity, but it’s the medical community’s duty to look for and disclose side effects. It’s not like changes in menstrual cycles and inflammation are new concepts, and yet, nobody thought to ask about them during the clinical trials. One woman even had to fight her trial site to include her menstrual changes in her chart, with the doctors brushing her off as perimenopausal.

As a feminist anthropologist, I’ve seen this kind of dismissal before, and I’m over it. Menstruating people deserve to be heard and not be treated like they’re imagining things. If we don’t address these side effects, people might avoid getting vaccinated, and that’s just bad for everyone.

So, how do we fix this? Well, it’s time to start noticing the different melodies and refrains we’re hearing. We need to move away from the idea that there’s one dominant melody and start listening to the dissonance. A trial design with more qualitative and open-ended approaches would hear far more melodies, and if we reported daily adverse events for longer than a week, we’d have time to see how menstruation responds.

Unfortunately, this approach goes against how gynecology has been practiced since the 19th century when Black and Brown midwives were pushed out. We’ve lost what comes with experience, opting for a form of expertise that’s mostly available to White men. We need to stop minimizing the experiences of those who menstruate and start studying these changes properly.

Transparency and listening to people with uteruses are essential if we want to earn public trust. It’s time to respect the complexity of our bodies and redesign medical research to accommodate menstruation fully. Until then, we’ll just have to hope we don’t bleed through our chairs.

Serious News: washingtonpost