A new Canadian study suggests that pregnant women have less severe side effects after the vaccine against COVID-19 than women who are not pregnant.
The Canadian National Vaccine Safety Network collected data from 191,360 vaccinated women aged 15 to 49 between December 2020 and November 2021.
Researchers asked participants to report “significant health events” after vaccination that were serious enough to cause them to miss school or work, see a doctor, or change their life routines.
Of 5597 pregnant participants, 4% reported a significant health problem within seven days of the first dose of an mRNA vaccine. After the second dose, 7.3% of the 3,108 pregnant respondents reported experiencing noticeable side effects.
However, among women who were not pregnant, 6.3% of 174,765 respondents reported a significant health problem after the first dose, and 11.3% of 10,254 participants reported feeling sick after the second dose.
Dr Julie Bettinger, lead author of the article published in the journal ‘Lancet Infectious Diseases’, says the findings are “unexpected” and warrant further investigation.
“Previous studies of other vaccines in pregnant women have mostly reported no significant differences in health events between pregnant and non-pregnant women — they have sometimes found higher rates during pregnancy,” said Professor Bettinger, a researcher at British Columbia Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, said Thursday.
“Further studies of mRNA vaccines for other diseases are needed to determine whether the reduction in side effects observed in pregnant women in this study is a feature of mRNA vaccines in general, or a specific feature of vaccines against COVID-19. »