A new Canadian study suggests that pregnant people experienced lower rates of health problems after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine than their non-pregnant counterparts.
The Canadian National Vaccine Safety Network collected data from 191,360 vaccinated women aged 15 to 49 between December 2020 and November 2021.
The researchers asked participants to report “significant health events” that were serious enough to cause them to miss school or work, seek medical attention, or disrupt their routine activities.
Of the 5,597 pregnant participants, four percent reported a significant health event within seven days of receiving the first dose of the mRNA vaccine, and 7.3 percent of the 3,108 pregnant respondents said they experienced side effects from the second vaccine.
Among those who were not pregnant, 6.3% of 174,765 respondents reported a significant health event after the first dose, and 11.3% of 10,254 participants said they felt sick after the second dose.
Dr. Julie Bettinger, senior author of the paper published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, said the findings were “unexpected” and warranted further investigation.
“Previous studies of other vaccines in pregnant women mostly reported no significant differences in health events between pregnant and non-pregnant women or found higher rates during pregnancy,” said Bettinger, a researcher at the Children’s Hospital of British Columbia, in press release on Thursday.
“Further studies of mRNA vaccines other than COVID-19 are needed to determine whether the reduced side effects seen in pregnant humans in this study are a feature of the mRNA vaccine platform or of these specific vaccines.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on August 12, 2022.
Add Comment