Why pregnant women should not fear the vaccine

The UK vaccine rollout is going at such a speed that a conundrum the Government has been putting off is now demanding attention. That is the question of whether pregnant women and those considering having a baby should be offered the jab.

The lack of trial data has caused the delay in making a recommendation, rather than anything suggesting that pregnant women or their unborn babies are at risk, although the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is expected to make a decision soon.

While confidence in the vaccine is generally high across the UK – around 91 per cent according to Office for National Statistics data – it is lower among pregnant women and those who want to get pregnant. The same ONS survey last week found 11 per cent of women who had negative feelings about the vaccine were pregnant or trying to conceive.

Widespread rumours on social media about the vaccine’s effect on fertility are unfounded, according to the Association of Reproductive and Clinical Scientists and the British Fertility Society.

“There is absolutely no evidence, and no theoretical reason, that any of the vaccines can affect the fertility of women or men,” it said.

Vaccine hesitancy among pregnant women is nothing new. In the UK, they are advised to have vaccines against flu and whooping cough, but uptake is only around 50 per cent and 69 per cent respectively.

Pregnant women in general are reluctant to take anything, says Prof

Shakila Thangaratinam, co-director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Global Women’s Health at the University of Birmingham.

“This is not just specific to vaccines alone. There is this overall concern that mothers have that anything they take is harmful to the baby,” she says.

This fear is compounded by the fact that pregnant women were not included in the initial trials of any of the front-running Covid vaccines, although Pfizer is now testing its vaccine in pregnant women in the US and Johnson & Johnson is to launch a study in the UK next month.

“We are not expecting any adverse effects in pregnancy, because the vaccines we’re administering are, like the flu vaccines, not based on a live virus,” says Prof Thangaratinam.

It is unclear how many pregnant women have been given the vaccine so far or what the uptake is among eligible groups. However, there is ample research on the effects of Covid on pregnant women.

A review of 192 studies published in the BMJ this week – co-authored by Prof Thangaratinam – showed that pregnant women were at higher risk of severe Covid-19.

A study of patients in UK intensive care over December and January found that one in nine women under the age of 50 in ICU was either pregnant or had recently given birth.

“Women need to balance the real risk of a severe disease because they have specific risk factors against the extremely small potential theoretical unknown risk associated with the vaccine,” Prof Thangaratinam added.

“I hope the real-world data and the eventual clinical trial data will reinforce the message to pregnant women that it is safe to take the vaccine.”