The Missing Babies of Europe

This article is part of a publishing collaboration between RESCUE and TrialSite News.

Evidence is growing in Europe that many fewer babies are being born in the aftermath of—and circumstantially related to—the covid-19 vaccination rollouts. This widespread phenomenon is alarming doctors, data analysts, and others who say a monumental shift is being ignored.

“Since January 2022, the number of live births has fallen like never before in Switzerland and the canton of Bern,” reads an urgent report by canton legislators. A separate Swiss research study, meantime, reported a 10 percent decline in births in the first half of 2022 compared to the prior three-year average. Using statistical modelling, it found “a striking temporal correlation between the peak of first vaccination and the decline in births in Switzerland.”

While the famously neutral Alpine nation has emerged as ground zero in a battle against vaccine-related infertility, several other reports suggest this is an across-the-continent problem that should be worldwide news. Because these key emerging reports are not in English, they are virtually unknown in the United States.

In perhaps the largest study on this worrisome trend, three analysts based in Germany studied data from nineteen countries in Europe. They found a 7 percent decline in births, translating into 110,059 fewer births in the first half of 2022 than the average of similar periods from 2019 to 2021. (Data was not analyzed for the United Kingdom and Italy.)

The words used to describe these trends help capture the gravity: unprecedented, massive, remarkable.

This emerging wave of European research—most in the last four months—is being done outside of normal channels and by independent researchers: a doctor, university professor, and legislator here; a high school educator, pharmacist, and statistician there. As such, a network of grassroots but statistically savvy people is stepping into a void left by government and regulatory agencies who reject the possibility of vaccine harm in all but a few discreet cases.

Written in German and translated also into French, the European study reported drops in births of more than 10 percent in five countries. In ten others, births declined from 4 percent to 9.4 percent. The highest decline, 18.8 percent, was in Romania.

“This very alarming signal cannot be explained by Covid-19 infections,” concluded the August 25, 2022 report, which, as in the Swiss reports, saw parallels between huge vaccination campaigns and, nine months later, the start of what one report called a “baby gap.”

“The correlation with the vaccination campaign and the situation at the time suggests that vaccination had physiological influences on the fertility of women or men,” the report on Europe stated, pointing to evidence of menstrual irregularities and declining sperm counts after vaccination.

But, so far, the Swiss and Europe-wide studies, along with articles on rising stillbirths in Germany and declining births in Germany and Sweden, have failed to raise much interest in the regulatory structures within Europe.

Swissmedic, which is the Swiss version of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has rejected any “causal connection” between covid vaccines and fewer babies.

The 6,000 missing

On November 14, a Zurich attorney announced a lawsuit against three officials in Swissmedic and five in Insel Group, which runs a large hospital center in Bern. The 300-page complaint alleges Swissmedic violated the nation’s criminal code by approving poorly tested, ineffective vaccines and then ignoring thousands of Swiss cases of related disability and death. Insel Group is part, it states, of the “circle of offenders.”

Among many alleged injuries listed in the complaint, including disability and deaths, was this: “Collapse in birth rates: over 6,000 missing babiesin 2022.”

Dr. Konstantin Beck, a University of Luzern insurance economist and statistician, co-authored the leading Swiss report that found “historic” birth declines. The last comparable drop in births, 13 percent, he told me, was during the 1914 mobilization of the Swiss Army at the start of World War I.

In a Zoom call, Beck and his co-author, infectious diseases physician Pietro Vernazza, discussed the“historically unprecedented drop in birth rates” that they found. Along with researchers like them, they are analyzing data as it becomes available and updating their findings; they are acutely aware of the need to share these trends quickly in a world in which adults of child-bearing age are still being pressured to vaccinate.

For now, Vernazza told me, he is “not convinced” that vaccines are indeed driving down births. But he is also suspect of the early official assurances, for example, that vaccine particles did not move throughout the body; evidence has since shown they accumulate in reproductive organs.

“With this situation, as a physician who wants to decide, or help decide, whether to take a booster or vaccine,” he said on our call, “I have less and less confidence that this vaccine cannot cause fertility issues.”

Warn potential parents? Absolutely not.

The thirty-nine-page report by Beck and Vernazza, dated September 22, 2022, calls on Swissmedic to warn potential parents about possible fertility risks of the vaccine. Beyond the documented decline in post-vaccine births, they contend that a fertility disorder caused by vaccination is “plausible” based on published findings.

“(A)nimal experimental pharmacokinetic data from Pfizer shows a continuous increase in the tissue level of mRNA lipid particles in the ovaries and testes of the experimental animals up to 48 hours after injection,” they wrote. Data is missing as to how long the concentrations last, they note.

Further, and also key to fertility, they pointed to a study of sperm donors that found a 22 percent drop in the number of motile sperm three to four months after vaccination. The drop was still 19 percent after five months.

The researchers acknowledge that these few and incomplete studies “are not sufficient to document a mechanism for the emergence of this drop in births.”

They are enough, however, to suggest that vaccinating people who want children might be reconsidered. Given the low covid-19 risk in this population, the natural immunity most people have, and the “unknown extent of fertility disorders, we would support an immediate recommendation to the population: people who still want to have children should be aware of the possibility of a fertility disorder…and refrain from further vaccination until this still open causal connection has been clarified.”

Swissmedic disagreed. Eight days after release of the Swiss birth report, the agency categorically rejected its conclusions in a letter to Beck and Vernazza.

“After carefully examining the report, Swissmedic comes to the conclusion that the data presented and the analysis cannot statistically prove a causal connection,” it states.

Nine months later

As in Switzerland, the study on Europe, entitled“Decline in Birth Rate in Europe,” tied the declining number of births to vaccine rollouts. “An effect of Covid 19 vaccinations is evident in view of the overall decline in birth rates 9 months after the start of the vaccination campaign in the 18-49 age group,” the report said. “This is evident in almost all countries.”

Raimund Hagemann, a retired chemistry teacher in Germany, worked with two like-minded researchers to assemble the report, which is part of the evidence in the Swiss lawsuit. The study includes eighty-nine pages of statistical compilations depicted in charts and annotated with scientific references.

Hagemann’s group reported that its analysis yielded a veritable statistical guarantee of accuracy in the form of p-values of 0.005 or less. In other words, there was less than a 1-in-200 chance that the link between rising vaccination levels and declining births was incorrectly made. That applies to the analysis for Europe as a whole and, individually, for the countries of Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Latvia, Austria, Germany, and Lithuania.

Hagemann told me he obtained birth data from each country’s statistical reporting system, which was available into 2022 for all but a handful of nations. In the United States, by contrast, such data is inexplicably difficult to come by, even as anecdotal reports point to problems in pregnancy (which I will write about in my next article). The Centers for Disease Control posts birth data only through 2020, as does my home state of New York. I asked the CDC press office via email if anything more recent was available and got no response.

Hagemann shares the frustration of dealing with governments that have no interest in criticizing vaccination programs they have ceaselessly trumpeted as safe, effective, and, even, honorable. Think what could be done if they took these signals seriously.

“If serious efforts were made to clarify the situation,” his report states, “close cooperation between clinics and specialist doctors could provide valuable information for the necessary and urgent re-evaluation of the risk-benefit assessment.” This, however, “is clearly not desired under the great influence of politics and the pharmaceutical industry.”

Indeed, Swissmedic’s rejection of any link between plummeting births and the vaccines was, by its own admission, closely linked to the vaccine movement internationally, not what is going on its own backyard:

“Findings from Swissmedic’s international cooperation with other drug authorities have shown that in none of the countries surveyed is a signal regarding Covid-19 vaccinations and a decline in the birth rate seen or evaluated.”

First signs of trouble

Twin studies from Germany, which I have written about before, provided early warning of the problems seen in maternity wards across Europe. Their findings align with the more recent studies.

The first, posted online on August 18, saw a link between covid vaccination campaigns and another ominous trend—of increasing numbers of unexplained, non-covid deaths. Similar to what other researchers have found since, the study saw a strong link to the mRNA shots—four waves of deaths correlated with “the strong increase of the number of vaccinations.”

Equally disturbing, the study, performed by an actuary-mathematician and a psychologist, found a “sudden and sustained” increase in stillborn babies. “In the year 2021, starting in April, a striking excess [stillbirth] mortality is observed,” they wrote.

A second study, released in early September by the (German) Federal Institute for Population Research and Stockholm University, entitled “Fertility declines near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence of the 2022 birth declines in Germany and Sweden,” reported birth declines in Germany and Sweden of 14 and 10 percent in early 2022. The study found a “strong association between the onset of vaccination programmes and the fertility decline nine months after of this onset.”

Significantly, the study found no statistical association with three other possible factors: covid infections, covid deaths, and unemployment.

Despite these warning signs, the Swiss Office of Public Health still encourages women—in advertisements in French, German, and English—to get vaccinated. Across a photograph of three female arms with heart-shaped Band-Aids, the ads read: “GET BETTER PROTECTION IN PREGNANCY WITH THE BOOSTER.” Beck said the ads appear in railway stations and newspapers.