Misinformation and muddled public health messaging have failed expectant parents. Now Omicron's surge is putting both carriers and babies at risk.
found that three-quarters of trials for Covid-19 treatments and vaccines explicitly excluded pregnant women. “The default position for all of society—for which the health care professions, including doctors, are not immune from—is to be very, very hesitant to offer pregnant people medicine,” Shah says.
This meant that the lag in waiting for data on the safety of the vaccines gave people ample time to become skeptical or fearful. In the meantime, communication from health authorities faltered, says Male, “and that's definitely a space where the people who, for whatever reason, want to spread misinformation can prey on that population.”
That we needed to prioritize pregnant people for vaccination should never have been a surprise, says Male. “We ought to have thought, this will be a group that we probably want to vaccinate. And if it's a group that we want to vaccinate, we do need to trial a vaccine in this population,” she says. After the Zika virus epidemic, a group calledwas set up by academics to devise guidelines for the ethical inclusion of pregnant people in vaccine trials during a public health emergency.
But in this case, the guidelines weren’t applied, says Male. “If we ever end up in another situation like this, I think if we think that pregnant people are going to need to be vaccinated, then we do need to include them in the trials,” she says. Shah believes the failure to prioritize the pregnant, and the grim repercussions of that, is something we should have foreseen and prepared for. “During every humanitarian disaster—whether it's a pandemic, a war, a weather event—the well-being of people who are pregnant suffers disproportionately,” says Shah. “And I don't know why we feel like we need to learn this lesson over and over again.
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