Studies Say COVID Vaccines During Pregnancy Are Good For Babies, But VIBES Say Different. Whom To Believe?
We'd go with the studies.
Last year, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the CDC updated its vaccine recommendations to say only that pregnant women “may” get COVID-19 vaccines, moving away from the previous recommendation that they should. Earlier this month, some Idaho lawmakers introduced a bill looking to ban the vaccine for pregnant women and for anyone under the age of 18, because bodily autonomy is a one-way street.
Why? Largely because people who think vaccines are bad assume that they must be extra bad for pregnant women. They just know it, deep, deep in their souls. Somehow. The same way they know everything.
They don’t need to consult with “experts”! But, if they did — or if they at least consulted with the experts at the American College of Gynecologists (ACOG), they’d at least learn that newborn babies actually benefit when their mothers get vaccinated while they are pregnant.
We’re not saying they’d believe them. Frankly, it seems a lot more likely that they’d try to put said gynecologists on trial for witchcraft, but they would hear about it.
Newborn babies can’t get vaccinated until they are six months old, which is why babies under six months have the second highest rate of COVID-related hospitalizations after adults aged 75 and older (well, they’re tied for it with adults aged 65-74, anyway). One in five of those babies who are hospitalized will end up in the ICU. However, a new study of more than 144,000 infants published in the scientific journal Pediatrics this past Friday found that newborns under six months whose mothers were vaccinated while they were pregnant are significantly less likely to get COVID or be hospitalized for it than those whose mothers did not.
The study also showed that those newborns whose mothers are vaccinated while pregnant are in no way more at risk of other infections, as at least one member of the recently disbanded Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had previously claimed.
Via NPR:
In this new study, researchers in Norway tracked 146,031 children born between March 2020 and December 2023 and looked at their medical records for up to two years after birth. The mothers of one in four of those children received the COVID vaccine while pregnant.
Babies exposed to the vaccine before birth were no more likely to visit the hospital for overall infections (of any kind) than those whose mothers did not get vaccinated in pregnancy. However, infants whose mothers were vaccinated were about half as likely to visit the hospital specifically for COVID in their first two months of life compared to babies not exposed to the vaccine in utero.
This is very good news for those of us who trust scientists over our own gut feelings, not least because we and our gut feelings failed biology sophomore year of high school (sorry if I didn’t want to dissect a frog!).
The researchers did find that the children of mothers who got the vaccine were 5 percent more likely to go to the doctor’s office for a COVID infection, but they chalked that one up to the fact that the anti-vaxxers probably wouldn’t even bother with that. One assumes they’d try, instead, to mix some ivermectin into the child’s pureed squash.
“If you're more likely to get vaccinated during pregnancy, you're probably more likely to take your newborn to the doctor to be checked out for those kinds of illnesses,” Dr. Kevin Ault, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, told NPR. “There's not really a biological mechanism to explain those findings,” otherwise, he says.
It’s almost as if being a responsible parent who cares whether your child lives or dies frequently leads to being a responsible parent who takes them to the doctor when they are sick instead of trying to heal them with crystals.
This is not the first study to demonstrate this phenomenon, a spokesperson from ACOG said, although it’s certainly one of the largest. Rather ironically, another study showed that female newborns of mothers who contracted COVID during pregnancy were 44 percent more likely to develop some neurodevelopmental conditions … including autism.
“Our study reinforces the importance of protecting oneself from COVID-19 before and during pregnancy,” lead author of that study, Lisa Croen, PhD, said. “Pregnant people are themselves more at risk of hospitalization if they get COVID-19. We are also now finding the potential for neurodevelopmental health risks for their children when they are exposed to the virus in utero.”
This is yet another reason why, according to all of the current research, it’s a really, really good idea for pregnant people to get vaccinated. It’s probably a better idea to listen to these researchers than to massive anti-vaccine Twitter accounts that think vaccines are the same thing as “injectables” like Botox — a neurotoxin — just because they are also injected.
There is no known benefit to newborns of mothers getting Botox, as they all come out pretty wrinkly anyway.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
“You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine.”
― Tim Minchin
Honestly I tell pregnant ladies they can get botox for migraines all the time because the data is sparse but does not suggest harm - but the data on the COVID vaccines are robustly in favor of vaccination - and as a high risk OB working during the delta wave the only pregnant ladies with covid in the ICU were the unvaccinated ones.