Clickbait-ey, but accurate.
Public Domain
This post is not an in-depth look into the science or anything like that, but I will guide you to the right places. Surprisingly, your standard googling won't actually come up with any proper fact-checks, with the mainstream ones failing quite miserably (at the time of checking).
Google has become increasingly censorious and controlling of what hits the first page, so for anyone frustrated by this, a good idea is to use duckduckgo in order to find your results on such niche or controversial topics. Duckduckgo only applies results according to the pure relevancy of the search provided.
The Claim
In short, a WordPress blog came out claiming that some legitimate scientists have concerns about the potential sterilization of women through the application of Pfizer's new vaccine.
Now, Pfizer doesn't have the best track record, with a history of unlicensed & unconsenting medical trials on children who ended up dead or permanently damaged (brain damage, etc) in Nigeria, to which they ended up having to pay out $75,000,000. From that, a total of just $700,000 went to just 4 of those victims.
In total, Pfizer has paid $5 billion in similar cases, including corporate corruption as well as healthcare-related offenses, since 2000. Source: violation tracker.org
One of the most famous was perhaps the record-breaking criminal offense of deceitful drug marketing where they would falsely advertise medicine and 'encouraged doctors to prescribe four medicines to treat symptoms the drugs were not FDA approved to treat' Source: Business Insider
By encourage, they mean 'bribe', offering to pay meals, travel expenses, and so on.
So, needless to say, the integrity of Pfizer is not what most people would want behind the vaccine of a global pandemic, especially when rushed through via 'project warp speed' to get things done years sooner than usual.
Should we trust them?
Look, I get it. I get there is cause for concern here, and I certainly disagree with the memes going around that literally tells you to just blindly accept what these government authorities demand you to do.
Like, yeah, your Google skills are meaningless if you want to delve into the deep scientific formulas and peer review processes, but Google can quite easily tell you about company corruption, genuine risks and benefits, and so on that one should always be aware of.
IF you know how to Google without pandering to your own biases. And that's really the main crux of the issue. If you search 'Vaccine causes autism', you'll likely find results that back that up. If you search 'Vaccine causes autism fact check', you'll likely find sources that debunk the idea.
But if you actually cross-examine and critically investigate those sources for bias, integrity, history, and so forth. You might actually have yourself a decent viewpoint; far better than simply sitting back and accepting the main narrative. The way of just following the mainstream news is long dead. This is why I think it's vital to have critical thinking as an actual part of the school curriculum. I doubt it'll ever happen though.
To confirm my point, let's go back to the vaccine sterilization issue. The Source came from a blog, and the blog genuinely quotes well-established doctors with a lot of legit educational background who actually worked at Pfizer.
But a quick look into the fact-checking sites and they'll tell you the news is false simply on the basis that he doesn't work there anymore, and that he has peddled nonsense in the past (the virus isn't as bad as the flu, the pandemic is already over - both things demonstrably false). The only other point they raise is that they worded things questionably.
Although this raises questions about the doctor's integrity, it does not satisfy a full understanding of what the doctor said. Nobody on the surface has actually debunked the claim that the protein syncytin-1 will be manipulated and make placental development impossible.
It certainly doesn't help that Pfizer refused to comment!
But this is where google skills and critical thinking comes in. Not finding something on the first 3 results on Google doesn't mean the answers aren't there. Refine your techniques a bit and you might stumble across, say, this.
Here we have a website which does not patronise or demonise, but simply poses the claim and delves into the scientific detail, with a layman's tl;dr at the beginning which states:
This sequence is too short for the immune system to meaningfully confuse it with placental proteins. It’s sort of like saying that you are going to be confused with a criminal because you wear a commonly sold red bracelet that was also found on the criminal. It’s not realistic. If this were true, we would also expect COVID-19 to cause early pregnancy loss a significant amount of the time. The evidence available to us does not support that this is the case. There is no reasonable basis to believe that vaccines against COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 will affect fertility.
The long version is, well, long. And you can visit the page for the full 3,000-word essay on the matter, backed up with over 20 sources as well as methods for you to investigate in a simple matter on your own.
It would take a LOT of work for anybody to call this out as partisan lies or government conspiracy. Anyone who says that without demonstrating their understanding of such publications is basically saying 'I didn't read it'.
So, as far as we can know, for now, there is no such risk as global sterilization. Women who are, or plan to be pregnant, are very typically exempted from taking vaccines in general, especially ones that need greater societal and long-term data. But this is all the more reason why the rest of us should get vaccinated; to protect those around us who cannot.
And hey, it could be worse, you could be me, in China, where forced vaccination with a Chinese brand vaccine is now inevitable and probably going to happen in the next few weeks.
Sounds fun, eh?