On Thursday, the Director of the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said that Covid-19 deaths among pregnant women reached a record high of 21 in August, urging expectant mothers to get vaccinated against the virus.
This comes a day after the CDC announced a health advisory for pregnant women to get vaccinated in a bid to reduce the risk of contracting a severe case of Covid and complicating the lives of their infants.
Walensky said this during a presentation to the Infectious Disease Society of America, according to CNBC.
What this means
According to her, only 31% of pregnant women in the country have been vaccinated, even though the risk of experiencing dangerous symptoms capable of jeopardizing the health of their infants are higher.
The Director said, “Compared with pregnant women without Covid, pregnant women with Covid are more likely to have a preterm birth or a stillbirth. And this very much demonstrates with a huge amount of evidence that pregnant women are at high risk of Covid-19, and their babies are at high risk as well.”
She said that more than 120,000 pregnant women in the U.S. have been diagnosed with Covid, and more than 5,000 pregnant women have participated in the agency’s vaccine safety monitoring programs so far.
Roughly half of those studied received the Pfizer vaccine, about 44% got Moderna’s and approximately 5% were immunized by Johnson & Johnson.
Furthermore, the director stated that the CDC has been able to determine that Covid vaccines have no impact on increasing the potential for miscarriage. This was discovered through the studying of participants. However, the findings were eventually expanded by CDC officials at a Sept. 22 meeting of the agency’s vaccine advisory committee, where it was reported that there exists a 12.8% risk of miscarriage by the 20th week of gestation among 2,456 pregnant women who have been vaccinated with Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.
According to CDC officials, the risk of miscarriage which was measured in the study aligns with the normal risk of miscarriage after adjusting for the mom’s age, however, the risk of miscarriage in unvaccinated pregnant women is twice more likely than non-pregnant women to need intensive care and a ventilator when they contract Covid.
