Best Maternity Hospitals 2021

Newsweek teamed up with The Leapfrog Group to find the best maternity hospitals to take care of mother and baby.

non-pregnant persons to be confident that the vaccine, overall, is safe and that you understand how it’s working. And then, you can add in pregnant women. But it is complicated, because you have both the woman’s health to worry about as well as the developing fetus’.

The problem is that now it’s almost too late. Although some of the vaccine manufacturers are planning phase-3 placebo-controlled clinical trials with pregnant women, the problem is it’s harder and harder to enroll a woman in a trial and tell her, “hey, you have a 50 percent chance of getting the vaccine and a 50 percent chance of not getting the vaccine” when she really wants to get the vaccine and it may otherwise be available to her.

Given what we know now about COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant women, what are the remaining concerns? Are more trials necessary?

At this point, thousands of pregnant women are being vaccinated. We now need to follow those women to make sure that it worked like it does in nonpregnant persons. More important, we need to make sure that the infants born to vaccinated women are healthy. Several vaccine manufacturers are opening clinical trials to enroll pregnant women.

From what you’re saying, there’s no reason to believe that they won’t be healthy.

Yes, there’s no theoretical reason why the vaccine would not be safe in pregnancy. But again, it is important that we don’t just say, “too late!” We need to actually follow these women and ensure that their outcomes are good.

What questions do you hear from pregnant women about the COVID-19 vaccines?

One question I hear often is, “I’m thinking about doing IVF [in-vitro fertilization]. Should I get immunized?” The answer is yes. Before you get pregnant, it’s a great time to get all your vaccinations, including COVID-19, if you are eligible.

Another question I hear is, “Can I become sterile if I take the vaccine?” That is a myth that has been propagated on social media, and in one blog in particular. It was supposedly based on a false claim that [one of the COVID-19 vaccines] had a protein that was similar to a placental protein. There is no truth to it, but it just keeps getting circulated.