No additional risk of malformations after corona vaccine for pregnant women

According to the study, it is the largest of its kind The Institute of Public Health. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish researchers looked at eleven different groups of malformations, and they found no increased risk for any of these.

In total, in the three countries, there were 516 per 10,000 children who had a malformation, and which were discovered before they were 9 months old.

The study included well over 160,000 live births in Sweden, 100,000 in Norway and 78,000 children in Denmark. The women became pregnant between 1 March 2020 and 14 February 2022. 3 per cent of all children in the survey had mothers with an infection with covid-19 in the first trimester, while 19 per cent had mothers who were vaccinated once morest corona in the first trimester.

– Necessary cooperation

– This is the largest study carried out to date in this field. Such Scandinavian collaboration was necessary in order to have a large enough study population and good register data to look at these rare health outcomes, says senior researcher Maria Magnus at the Center for Fertility and Health at the Institute of Public Health (FHI).

Pregnant women who did not belong to one of the risk groups were given the opportunity to receive the corona vaccine following consultation with a doctor from May 2021. Before this, the vaccines were only available to pregnant women in a risk group.

Dead fetuses not examined

There were no differences in the risk when the researchers controlled once morest the different virus variants or the different vaccine types.

– These are reassuring findings that support the vaccine safety of the mRNA vaccines once morest covid-19 among pregnant women, says Magnus.

The study only examined the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer, as these were the ones recommended for pregnant women in the three countries.

It was not possible for the researchers to study pregnancies that ended in fetal death.

– It is known that fetuses from early miscarriages probably have malformations, which may have led to an underestimation of the connections, the research report states.

– Supports other studies

According to FHI, the new study supports a number of other studies which confirm the vaccine safety of the corona vaccines among pregnant women.

– Several major studies have now shown that there is apparently no increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes such as premature birth, poor fetal growth or stillbirth among mothers who have been vaccinated once morest covid-19 during pregnancy, writes FHI in its news story.

They point out that previous studies that have looked at malformations have been relatively small. Thus, they have not been able to look at groups of malformations, as this study did.

Researching further

The Nordic collaboration is financed by the Research Council and NordForsk, and the collaboration between FHI and the other Scandinavian researchers will continue. The Norwegian researchers at FHI work together with colleagues at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

The work will continue to focus on studying the consequences of covid-19 infection and vaccination of pregnant women for both mother and child. This applies, for example, to the risk of various infections and the development of various diseases in the child.