The data on whether pregnancy increases the risk for coronavirus or leads to more complications is incomplete, but preliminary indications are that it is a potential risk factor. Yet so far, manufacturers and U.S. regulators have held off on including pregnant women in coronavirus vaccine trials.
More than 210,000 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, and tens of thousands are testing positive daily. The best way to defeat the pandemic is with a safe vaccine that can protect a large share of the population, especially people at higher risk of exposure, such as frontline health workers, and those more vulnerable, such as the elderly and, some health experts maintain, pregnant women.
However, it isn’t unreasonable that they have not been included in trials yet. When most vaccines are being developed, they are usually tested first in healthy adults. The experts’ concerns about the absence of pregnant women in these important vaccine trials are also not unreasonable, considering that there exists a history of excluding this group in clinical research trials.
The full extent of how COVID-19 may affect a mother and her fetus is not fully known yet. Dr. Flor Munoz, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, told Yahoo News that one of the reasons is that the number of pregnant women infected with the virus has not been large enough to really give a full picture.
The best U.S. data so far on COVID-19’s impact on pregnant women comes from a late June report by the CDC. The data was collected for a period of nearly five months during which, as part of COVID-19 surveillance, the CDC received reports of 326,335 women of childbearing age who tested positive for the coronavirus. Data on pregnancy status was available for 91,412 of them.
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