Several widely shared social media posts are claiming that most pregnant women in Australia who received the Covid-19 vaccine experienced miscarriages, and that the country’s birth rate fell 67% as a result.
These claims are false.
The posts, which we’ve seen on Facebook and TikTok, come originally from a 2024 interview with a funeral director called John O’Looney, who we have fact checked twice before.
Vaccinated women are no more likely to suffer miscarriages
The source for Mr O’Looney’s claims of a 76% miscarriage rate among vaccinated women isn’t entirely clear. In the video he says: “76% of Covid vaccinated mothers lost their babies… I spoke to Luke McLindon to confirm who he was and what he’d said. And it’s a real thing.”
This refers to an Australian doctor, whose supporters do cite a figure of 74%. But we cannot find any published source that makes clear exactly how the figure was calculated or what it represents.
An ABC fact check says an unverified article reported that a colleague of Dr McLindon claimed this came from a very small sample of high-risk pregnancies. But we have not seen this article ourselves, and cannot verify this either.
However, Dr McLindon does say in an online video interview from 2022 (37m59s), that 17 of his 23 vaccinated patients experienced miscarriage, which would be 74% of them.
If this is the source of his statistic, and if it is the figure Mr O’Looney was referring to, then it certainly doesn’t demonstrate that 74% (or 76%) of vaccinated women experience miscarriage.
For one thing, 23 patients would be an extremely small sample to draw conclusions from. But perhaps more importantly, Dr McLindon himself acknowledged that his patients were not representative of women who get pregnant overall. As he says in the video (37m10s), “they’re a little bit older, they’ve experienced infertility, and/or they have recurrent miscarriages”.
In fact, there are many large and published scientific studies, which have found no link between the Covid vaccine and miscarriage.
As Oxford University’s Vaccine Knowledge Project says: “There is no evidence to suggest that COVID-19 vaccines can affect fertility in either women or men. There is also no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines can increase risk of miscarriage, stillbirth or congenital abnormalities if given before or during pregnancy. There is no need to delay COVID-19 vaccination for individuals trying to become pregnant.”
In general, it is estimated that about 10-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage in the first 12 weeks, and a further 3-4% end in late miscarriages after that.
The birth rate in Australia
Mr O’Looney also claims: “Senator Robert McDonald in the Australian parliament openly discussed it. The birth rate’s gone down 67% in Australia.”
In 2022, an Australian senator did claim there was a 67% decline in the birth rate in the second half of 2021. But his name was Malcolm Roberts, not “Robert McDonald”—and this was not correct.
In a blog, Senator Roberts explained that his figure comes from data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. But in fact a delay in registering births meant that many of those that happened later in the year were not included in the data at the time it was published. So this is a lag in the system, not an actual decline in births. Indeed many of the comments on Senator Roberts’s blog have pointed this out.
If you look at the latest data, there is no fall in births in July-December 2021, as Senator Roberts had claimed. In fact these months all show that more births happened in 2021 than in the same months the year before.
Mr O’Looney replied to our email about these claims and said he had spoken to “hundreds” of healthcare professionals, but did not address the questions we asked.
We’ve often seen false claims about the Covid vaccines and pregnancy being shared online.
