Candace Owens repeats unsubstantiated claim about HPV vaccine causing infertility

On 9 May 2025, political commentator Candace Owens claimed on X that Gardasil harms female fertility. Her posts drew more than 1.6 million views and more than 24,000 likes.

It’s not the first time Owens has cast doubt on vaccine safety. As anti-vaccine claims about infertility go, Owens’ claim is also not novel. Conspiracy theories that vaccines are used to control fertility and population numbers have circulated for decades, sometimes invoking additional conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and “The Great Reset”.

In the 1990s, claims circulated in Kenya that the tetanus vaccine was being used to sterilize women of childbearing age. This Snopes article reported that the tests used to back up this claim turned out to be performed incorrectly and ultimately, no scientific evidence could be found to support these claims.

But these claims continue to endure, revived by a 2022 film titled “Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda”. The film was directed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now the U.S. health secretary, and produced by Andrew Wakefield, whose flawed and later retracted MMR vaccine study promoted the false claim that vaccines cause autism.

The COVID-19 vaccines, also regular subjects of vaccine misinformation, weren’t spared from false associations with infertility, as articles from Science Based Medicine reported. Science Feedback also addressed similar claims in earlier reviews.

What is HPV and what does the HPV vaccine do?

Human papillomavirus is a DNA virus that’s also one of the most common sexually transmitted infections. There are more than 200 members of the human papillomavirus family, but only two are associated with the majority of cancers (HPV16 and HPV18).

In 90% of people who are infected with HPV, the immune system successfully manages to clear the infection. But in the remaining 10%, HPV infection persists. If persistent infection is caused by high-risk HPV types, it can lead to cervical cancer as well as cancers of the vulva, vagina, mouth/throat, penis, and anus.

While a proportion of one in ten appears small, it still translates to hundreds of thousands of new cancer cases globally every year. Estimates of global cancer cases by the International Agency for Research on Cancer found that there were 690,000 new cases of cancer caused by HPV in 2018^[1]. Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women globally. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cervical cancer caused approximately 350,000 deaths worldwide in 2022, with about 94% of deaths in low- and middle-income countries.

HPV vaccination can prevent infection from certain high-risk HPV. Several types of HPV vaccines exist, but perhaps the most well-known brand name is Gardasil. Initially targeting just four high-risk HPV types, there is now a version of the vaccine available that protects against nine high-risk HPV types.

The most common side effects of the HPV vaccine are mild and short-lived. These include pain and soreness at the injection site, fainting, fever, and headache. Experts told Science Feedback that many studies have shown the HPV vaccine is safe.

And several studies across Europe have shown that HPV vaccination has greatly cut the number of cervical cancer diagnoses^[2-5].

Yet while scientific evidence demonstrates its health benefits, vaccine uptake continues to lag behind, meaning that many preventable cancer cases will continue to occur (see Figure 1).

This lag in vaccine uptake is due to various factors. In some countries, access to the HPV vaccine is limited owing to economic barriers. Additionally, pervasive misinformation about the HPV vaccine’s safety has played a role in shaping negative attitudes about the vaccine^[6], potentially discouraging wider vaccine uptake, even in places where the vaccine is easy to obtain.

No credible evidence that HPV vaccine causes primary ovarian insufficiency and thus infertility

An enduring myth about the HPV vaccine is that it causes primary ovarian insufficiency (POI), also known as premature ovarian insufficiency. The condition affects women below 40 years of age and occurs as a result of a decline in ovarian function, which significantly impacts fertility.

POI affects about one in 100 females; for all females under the age of 30, this figure is even smaller: one in 1,000 females^[7]. The causes of POI are still unclear, but scientific evidence suggests that one risk factor for developing POI is certain chromosomal abnormalities. These chromosomal abnormalities can be congenital (present from birth), or occur as a side effect of conventional cancer treatments like radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Anecdotal case reports about six girls who developed POI some time after receiving the HPV vaccine, as well as a highly flawed analysis that was later retracted, have been used to back up this claim. It’s also notable that one of these case reports was also authored by two individuals, Lucija Tomljenovic and Yehuda Shoenfeld, who have encouraged and espoused anti-vaccine views. That particular case report was criticized in this 2013 post by surgical oncologist David Gorski.

While case reports are interesting and, collectively, can help alert the scientific community to potential adverse effects for investigation, they aren’t sufficient on their own to demonstrate causality. Apart from a temporal association—namely that the HPV vaccine was given at some point in time before a POI diagnosis—these reports don’t provide other evidence, like a possible biological mechanism, that would help demonstrate a causal relationship.

An analysis by Gayle DeLong, an economics professor and anti-vaccine activist, purported to find a relationship between the HPV vaccine and infertility. The analysis looked at data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, specifically whether women aged 25 to 29 ever reported being pregnant, and whether this was different between vaccinated and unvaccinated women.

It found that women who had received the HPV vaccine were less likely to report having ever been pregnant compared to unvaccinated women. Based on this finding, DeLong concluded that this difference was due to the HPV vaccine affecting fertility.

This conclusion is flawed. One of the most glaring drawbacks of the analysis is that it didn’t account for the use of contraception (birth control) in the groups that were compared. If one group was more or less likely to use birth control, this would clearly influence differences in ever-pregnancy.

Furthermore, as a letter to the journal’s editor pointed out, if HPV vaccination caused fertility to decline, then such a trend should also have been seen in other countries like Australia where the HPV vaccine was available, yet this wasn’t the case.

Finally, scientist Elisabeth Bik observed that there were more women with a college degree in the HPV-vaccinated group compared to the unvaccinated group. This introduces an important confounding factor in the analysis, since women with a college degree tend to have babies in their thirties, while women without a college degree tend to have babies in their twenties. DeLong’s analysis would be likely to miss those later births as it only looked at women aged 25 to 29.

“If you limit the study group to women <30 years old, that means that the average women with a college degree did not have their first baby yet,” Bik wrote.

DeLong’s analysis was retracted by the journal in 2022, following post-publication reviews that found “serious flaws in the statistical analysis and interpretation of the data”.

A 2021 study using data from the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) reported finding that the number of VAERS reports related to POI or POI-associated symptoms was higher for the HPV vaccine compared to those for non-HPV vaccines^[8]. But it also acknowledged that VAERS reports provided incomplete data that made it challenging to establish whether reports pertained to a true case of POI in the first place, and that it was unable to demonstrate causality.

Large-scale studies didn’t find HPV vaccine causes primary ovarian insufficiency

In 2019, the Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS), an independent expert committee that advises the WHO, evaluated the evidence for the HPV vaccine’s potential link to infertility. The evidence it looked at included the case reports mentioned earlier, as well as studies that examined a much larger group of people. The GACVS concluded:

“[T]he available data do not support an association between HPV vaccination and infertility or POI. The current safety profile continues to be extremely favourable, as discussed at 7 previous GACVS meetings, and consistent with the pre-licensure safety profile.” [emphasis added]

One study it examined was performed in the U.S. and drew on data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink program. More than 199,000 people were included in the study. It found no association between multiple vaccines, including the HPV vaccine, and POI^[9].

Another large study published in 2021, using Danish national healthcare records, found no association between HPV vaccination and POI^[10]. Its conclusion supports the 2019 GACVS consensus:

“In this nationwide cohort study of 996,300 Danish girls and women, we found no association between 4HPV vaccination and primary ovarian insufficiency. The rate of primary ovarian insufficiency was not statistically significantly increased among vaccinated individuals compared with unvaccinated individuals overall or in time periods after vaccination”.

In summary, no credible evidence backs up the claim that the HPV vaccine causes POI.

On the contrary, what can increase a person’s risk of infertility is cervical cancer, more than 90% of which is caused by HPV. This is because treatments involve chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which can affect the proper functioning of the uterus and ovaries. In some cases, the uterus may need to be removed altogether (hysterectomy), making future pregnancy impossible.

Conclusion

Claims that the HPV vaccine causes infertility are part of a broader narrative combining vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories about population control, of which Owens’ tweet is an example. Anecdotal case reports of primary ovarian insufficiency after vaccination and a flawed analysis, which was later retracted, have been presented as evidence for these claims.

But large-scale studies didn’t find an association between primary ovarian insufficiency and HPV vaccination. There’s no credible evidence showing that the HPV vaccine causes serious health problems. On the contrary, HPV vaccination has helped to significantly cut cervical cancer diagnoses, demonstrating important benefits to individuals and public health.

REFERENCES

• 1 – De Martel et al. (2020) Global burden of cancer attributable to infections in 2018: a worldwide incidence analysis. The Lancet.
• 2 – Lei et al. (2020) HPV Vaccination and the Risk of Invasive Cervical Cancer. New England Journal of Medicine.
• 3 – Kjaer et al. (2021) Real-World Effectiveness of Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Against Cervical Cancer. Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
• 4 – Palmer et al. (2024) Invasive cervical cancer incidence following bivalent human papillomavirus vaccination: a population-based observational study of age at immunization, dose, and deprivation. Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
• 5 – Arbyn et al. (2024) Linkage of individual-patient data confirm protection of prophylactic human papillomavirus vaccination against invasive cervical cancer. Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
• 6 – Sonawane et al. (2021) Trends in Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Safety Concerns and Adverse Event Reporting in the United States. JAMA Network Open.
• 7 – Tucker et al. (2016) Premature Ovarian Insufficiency: New Perspectives on Genetic Cause and Phenotypic Spectrum. Endocrine Reviews.
• 8 – Tatang et al. (2022) Human Papillomavirus Vaccination and Premature Ovarian Failure: A Disproportionality Analysis Using the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Drugs Real World Outcomes.
• 9 – Naleway et al. (2018) Primary Ovarian Insufficiency and Adolescent Vaccination. Pediatrics.
• 10 – Hviid et al. (2021) Association Between Human Papillomavirus Vaccination and Primary Ovarian Insufficiency in a Nationwide Cohort. JAMA Network Open.