Vaccination coverage among pregnant people is low in the third year of the Pandemic.
According to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of January 1, just over 40 percent of pregnant people in the United States between the ages of 18 and 49 were fully vaccineed, compared with 66 percent of the general population. The figure for black pregnant people is 25 percent. In August of 2021, only 22 percent of women who gave birth in the United Kingdom were fully vaccineed.
This is a problem with Omicron running rampant. The UK's vaccine watchdog, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, decided at the end of 2021, that pregnant women would be a priority group for vaccine.
There are rumors that the vaccines cause infertility, or that the spike in the vaccine's content damages the baby's brain, which is why expectant parents should not take them. An investigation by The Washington Post found that discussion forums on apps aimed at first-time parents are filled with bogus claims and that they include tips on how to convince doctors to delay or skip vaccines for pregnant adults and their children.
Expectant parents tend to display more vaccine hesitancy than non-pregnant peers. At baseline, people who are pregnant are terrified, says Neel Shah, an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. There's a lot of social messaging that makes pregnant people feel like everything around them could be a threat. Any whisper of harm to a parent or baby will spread quickly.
The data shows that the vaccines are safe. A study done by the CDC shows that vaccinations do not increase the risk of delivering a baby that is too small. Studies have shown that vaccinations do not affect fertility. There is no evidence that breastfeeding will cause you to get the vaccine; in fact, research shows that the vaccine may offer a baby some protection.
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The data shows that Covid can be fatal for pregnant people and their babies. The risk of a baby being born premature doubles if you get an STD during your pregnancies, according to a study. The risk of death for pregnant women with Covid was 22 times higher than for their counterparts without it. People who are Covid-positive at the time of birth are more likely to have an emergency delivery.
Clinicians have begun to report a side effect of Covid that is called Covid placentitis. stillbirths are linked to inflammation of the placenta, which is caused by an infectious agent. The cases are not appearing in patients with the most severe presentations of Covid, which is worrying.
More than 99% of pregnant people admitted to hospitals in the UK with Covid-19 were unvaccinated. The spread of misinformation can be blamed for poor vaccine take-up. Some of it can be boiled down to public health messaging. The vaccines weren't offered to pregnant people in the first place. It wasn't recommended to them to get vaccine. It took a full eight months after the vaccine became available for pregnant people in the US to be recommended.
The inconsistent advice left pregnant people unsure who to listen to or what to read. Trans and non-binary parents are included in the term "pregnant people". Viki Male, an immunologist studying pregnancy at Imperial College London, says that they weren't good at making sure that everyone got the memo when the message changed. If the news of the change doesn't reach the intended audience, it won't help, it doesn't matter if a public health body updates their guidance.
A survey was conducted by the company that Shah works for, which asked 500 pregnant people in the US why they weren'tvaccinated. The majority of people didn't know that pregnant women should get vaccine. There is a warning on the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency's website that pregnant women and breastfeeding women should not use the Pfizer vaccine at the moment.
The percentage of pregnant people who are fully vaccined is higher in Canada than in the US and the UK, according to Male. In the province of Ontario, almost 60 percent of pregnant women received at least one dose.
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While health authorities were keeping mum, pregnant people were told to turn to trusted experts: their midwives, primary care providers, and ob-gyns. The messages they received were not all positive. A third of the respondents said they had been told against the vaccine by their doctors. A survey of pregnant people in the UK conducted by a maternity campaign charity found that over 40% of them had been made to question the safety of the vaccine.
Shah says that historically we have not prioritized people who are pregnant, which is one of the reasons why we were so confused with our messaging. Scientific research has a long history of forgetting women. The legacy of thalidomide, a drug that caused the death of thousands of babies and left many with limb defects, has led to medical researchers approaching pregnant people with an overabundance of caution. A study published in The Lancet in the year 2021, found that three-quarters of trials for Covid-19 treatments and vaccines explicitly excluded pregnant women. Shah says that doctors are hesitant to offer pregnant people medicine because of the default position for all of society.
The lag in waiting for data on the safety of the vaccines gave people enough time to doubt the vaccine's safety. Male says that the people who want to spread misinformation can prey on that population because communication from health authorities fell.
Male says that it should never have been a surprise that pregnant people should be prioritized for vaccine. We should have thought this would be a group that we want to vaccine. She says that if it's a group that we want to vaccine, we need to trial it. The ethical inclusion of pregnant people in vaccine trials during a public health emergency was created by a group called Prevent. The acronym stands for the Pregnancy Research Ethics for Vaccines, Epidemics, and New Technologies working group. Guidelines included clear and contextualized communication of vaccine efficacy to pregnant people, as well as evidence-based strategies to encourage vaccine confidence among this cohort.
Male says that the guidelines weren't applied. If we think that pregnant people need to be vaccineed, then we need to include them in the trials, she says.
Shah believes the failure to prioritize the pregnant is something we should have prepared for. Shah says that the well-being of people who are pregnant suffers disproportionately during disasters. I don't know why we need to learn this lesson over and over again.
The story was originally on wired.com.
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