I saw a video that said it can, and can spread through intercourse, I know that sounds a little nuts but I can't find the video anymore because results are absolutely flooded with no it won't cause fertility. That leads me to believe otherwise.
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While Syncytin-1 and the SARS-cov-2 spike protein are not completely unrelated proteins, the sequence similarity is very low.
The article that picture is from (see section 10) gives more information. While I strongly disagree with the conclusions of the article, the science on the protein is good.
I realize that sequence data is likely not terribly useful to you, perhaps the article might help a little. I don't look at sources that are not papers (real science) because I can't check other sources. I can check the science because I know the science, and can thus determine if the science was done well.
My conclusion on looking at the different proteins is that with such a low similarity (a mere 4 amino acids in a similar place on a similar heptad repeat (a very common protein pattern)) it is unlikely that an immune response to one would have any immune response to the other.
This is very low on my list of concerns for the vaccine. Indeed, if it can happen with the vaccine, it can happen with a natural immune response as well. I don't personally think it will happen with either one. I still would like to see tests done because the concern is not completely without merit.
I didn't fully understand what you were asking about the sperm and egg thing. It is possible that there could be a problem with sperm production (again, very unlikely imo) because of an autoimmune response to the syncytin-1 that presents on the surface of sperm, but that wouldn't in any way translate to a sexually transmitted effect. Such ideas are completely baseless biologically speaking.
The most it could do is the immune system would destroy the sperm as it was being produced. Frankly that seems highly unlikely to me. Also if that was the case it would be a constant immune response and you would likely have bigger issues than sperm production.
This is my greatest concern with the vaccines. All previous coronavirus vaccines had this pathogenic priming problem, which caused a cytokine storm upon encountering the real virus at a later time. This extreme immune response was fatal in about 5% of the vaccine recipients (most were animal studies, if I remember correctly only one I saw was on humans several decades ago). I apologize for not providing links to papers at this time, I am busy atm. If you would like papers on this effect, either in explaining what it is or links to previous coronavirus vaccine experiments let me know and I will get back to it later.
I do not know that these vaccines will have this problem. It should have been tested on animals prior to human studies since it was a known effect for previous vaccines. Not having done so is a direct violation of the Nuremberg code and thus a crime against humanity.
If this is a problem it is likely that not being vitamin D + vitamin K + zinc + magnesium deficient will help alleviate this potential immune response. (These are also the best protectors for the current coronavirus, likely much better than the vaccine.) It is also likely that time will reduce the probability of this occurring (though that is an educated guess).
I sincerely hope pathogenic priming is not a huge issue, or next SARS season is gonna be brutal.
Thank you for your detailed response and insights. I was just throwing around ideas to see if any would stick. Indeed, it would seem logical that a cell presenting the spike proteins would trigger the same kind of immune response as would the virus itself, though I don’t know if this is exactly the case. In which case, any problems regarding the immune system attacking parts of the human body due to the spike protein-learning would likely also occur from natural encounters and learning of the virus itself. Which is to say, it would not happen (if it did, it would be a fatal flaw in the design of the immune system, which I highly doubt).
I don’t have the same reading that you do, so hearing that the similarity between the spike protein and reproductive protein is limited to a sequence of 4 amino acids is very reassuring. I assume even this small matchup is very uncommon, otherwise it would not have been brought up to attention in the first place, but it sounds like this is still of low concern.
The topic of cytokine storm is interesting, though I need to look into how that situation even occurs to begin with. My understanding of it is that the immune system configures itself in a certain way in response to the presented protein, which somehow disrupts the whole start & stop mechanism. If that primitive understanding is correct, then it begs the question of how come this same situation does not also happen as a result of natural encounters with the virus? Or maybe it does?