It should be remembered that COVID is associated with a increased risk of complications in pregnant women, including miscarriages, and an increased risk of complications in the baby, including a stay in intensive care. One of the questions behind this study was therefore whether the vaccine reduced this risk. Everything was tending in this direction, since we had had time, in nearly two years, to establish that several pathologies were much more present in patients with COVID — even in children.
But pregnant women have traditionally been a special clientele in drug trials: they have long been excluded from many of the studies which, in the case of COVID, has delayed the arrival of reliable data. The worries around the vaccine have reinforced the problem and the leaders of the anti-vaccine movements have, as early as the fall of 2020, deliberately targeted pregnant women.
However, in their meta-analysis —a summary of studies— published on October 3 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, eight researchers from Japan and the United States conclude that vaccination in these women is associated with a lower risk of admission of the newborn to intensive care than in non-vaccinated mothers, and with a lower risk of mortality. at birth. There is no correlation with premature births, caesarean sections or postpartum hemorrhage.
The researchers reviewed nine studies totaling, as of April 25, more than 81,000 women who had received at least one dose of the vaccine, with 255,000 women not vaccinated. The average age was slightly higher in the vaccinated groups (32 to 35 years, compared to 29.5 to 33 years).
Throughout the world, however, the vaccination rate among pregnant women remains much lower than among the general population.