Mom delivers baby after losing husband to COVID-19: ‘It was so bittersweet’ - WJW FOX 8 News Cleveland

AUSTIN (KXAN) – Emergency C-sections and pre-term births — doctors say that’s what some pregnant women are facing right now if they haven’t been vaccinated for COVID-19.

“We were even given the opportunity to go to Florida for a lung transplant, but he was so unstable that that couldn’t happen,” Garza explained.

Any pregnant woman out there, as a mom, what you want to do first and foremost is to protect your children, and I was able to do that with the COVID vaccine,” Garza said.

Many local doctors in Texas are encouraging pregnant women to get the vaccine as cases rise.

They are now seeing vaccine hesitancy among some pregnant women and say those women face severe COVID symptoms and the possibility of becoming critically ill in their second and third trimesters.

So pregnant women are certainly at a very high risk of getting sick, sicker than the general population if they contract COVID,” Thoppil said.

He says researchers are looking at data from tens of thousands of pregnant women who have been vaccinated, and they are not seeing complications for mom or baby.

“There are now actually new trials looking specifically at pregnant women, but we have that data retrospectively looking back at who got vaccinated, and we’re seeing no change in outcome, meaning that there is no increased risk of complications.

He says the new trials for pregnant women are addressing other variants.

“We have some pretty compelling data that the vaccine is 80% effective in the Israeli trials for the delta variant, but more importantly the people who got it had very mild disease,” said Thoppil.