Vaccine hesitancy in pregnant people drives rise in Covid hospitalizations - CNN

Initially the CDC said that pregnant people could get the vaccine but it did not recommend it.

That's because the initial vaccine studies did not intentionally include pregnant people, although there were some participants who became pregnant during the studies.

At least 180 pregnant people have died from Covid since the start of the pandemic, with 22 deaths recorded in August alone, according to the CDC.

More than 22,500 pregnant people have been hospitalized with Covid since the start of the pandemic, with 12% of those cases resulting in admission to the ICU, according to the CDC figures.

One in five of the country's most critically ill Covid patients are unvaccinated pregnant women, the National Health Service (NHS) said in a Monday statement.

Pregnant women accounted for almost a third (32%) of all women between the ages of 16 and 49 on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) -- a medical therapy used only when a patient's lungs are so damaged that a ventilator cannot maintain oxygen levels, the NHS said.

England's chief midwife, Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent, said the statistics were "another stark reminder that the Covid-19 jab can keep you, your baby and your loved ones, safe and out of hospital."

Globally, Covid vaccine guidelines for pregnant and lactating people still vary, with 51 countries explicitly recommending that some or all pregnant people should receive the vaccine, according to the COMIT Covid-19 Maternal Immunization Tracker.

The vaccines are permitted for pregnant people in 53 countries and in an additional 23 countries for people who are essential health workers or who have underlying health conditions.

A total of 32 countries do not recommend the vaccine for pregnant people yet.

Two studies published in September show that Covid vaccines do not increase the risk of miscarriage.

"Vaccine hesitancy among young women is largely driven by false claims that Covid-19 vaccines could harm their chances of future pregnancy," Male wrote in the British Medical Journal last month.

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Breastfeeding could help to protect infants from the disease

Research has shown that most pregnant people who got the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines passed protective antibodies to their newborns through the placenta, and lactating women might pass antibodies to their babies through breast milk.