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Pregnant women come last
The omicron variant is heightening risks for this little-talked-about demographic: pregnant women.
Left out of early vaccine trials and faced with confusing messages and misinformation on the dangers to their unborn children, a disproportionately large number of pregnant women have steered clear of Covid shots. About 75% of expectant mothers in the U.K. and about 65% in the U.S. remain unvaccinated, making them among the groups most at risk of getting infected and being exposed to severe forms of the disease as the fast-spreading omicron strain sweeps the globe.
At least 17 pregnant women and four babies have died from Covid-19 in England between May and October, figures published last week show. Over that period, 98% of pregnant women admitted to intensive care were unvaccinated. Also, since July, one in five Covid patients receiving treatment in England through a special lung-bypass machine was an unvaccinated expectant mother.
“The uptake of vaccination in pregnant women is depressingly low, and significant numbers of women have come to serious harm as a result of this,” Chris Whitty, the U.K.’s chief medical adviser, told lawmakers on Dec. 16. “Pregnancy’s a period of vulnerability. We really should have made that point even clearer earlier on.”
Take Antonia, for instance. The London lawyer, who’s seven months pregnant, got her first jab before she was pregnant but struggled over her second, post-pregnancy inoculation. Vaccine centers didn’t have reassuring answers to her questions, and she got the shot with a lot of trepidation.
“I was so nervous I booked the vaccination so many times and canceled it,” says Antonia, 38, who’s having her second child and didn’t want to reveal her last name. “I just thought, ‘It’s not my life here, it’s somebody else’s life I’m making decisions about.’”
Many maternal-care specialists saw the problem coming when women weren’t included in clinical trials.
At least one drugmaker tried. In February, Pfizer initiated a mid-stage study in pregnant women before moving to advanced-stage testing in June. But low enrollment and the ethical dilemma of giving placebos to expectant mothers when vaccines were already recommended saw the trial halted with less than 10% of its target 4,000 volunteers.
Peter Marks, head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine program, says if the agency could start over, it would do things differently.
“If we weren’t in such a pandemic ‘all-out’ mode, we probably could have started a trial early on in pregnant women,” Marks said in an interview. If he could go back, Marks said he’d likely initiate a test for pregnant women “within a few months after we had safety data flowing in from the phase 3 clinical trials.”—Suzi Ring
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December 27, 2021 at 07:30PM
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Pregnant Women Come Last: When Vaccine Doubts Prove Fatal - Bloomberg
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