Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

EDITORIAL:

Expectant mothers can best protect themselves, their babies by getting vaccinated

Coronavirus

Eduardo Munoz / AP

In this Dec. 21, 2020, photo, Michelle Chester, director of employee health services at Northwell Health, prepares the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish Valley Stream hospital in Valley Stream, N.Y.

Vaccine hesitancy among pregnant women has fueled a surge of expectant mothers contracting COVID-19, with heartrending consequences. Many are being admitted to ICUs, placed on ventilators, giving birth prematurely or suffering miscarriages. Others are dying.

The tragic surge has prompted physicians across the nation to issue a desperate plea to expectant mothers to receive their vaccinations.

There’s abundant reason behind the doctors’ concerns. According to recent government statistics, 76% of pregnant women in the United States were unvaccinated as of mid-August. Yet as reported in a recent study in the American Medical Association’s online journal, pregnant women with COVID-19 are 22 times more likely to have a preterm birth than those without the disease, and are 14 times more likely to require intubation. They’re also 15 times more likely to die.

Pregnant women also suffer more serious and fatal cases of COVID-19 than non-pregnant individuals.

Meanwhile, the vaccines have proven safe for pregnant women and their unborn children. What’s more, medical experts say the vaccines help protect not only women but children from infection, with vaccinated mothers transferring antibodies in utero that give babies some resistance to the disease once they’re born.

And while there are side effects from the shots, they’re mild in the overwhelming majority of cases, limited to soreness around the spot of the injection, a slight fever and so forth as the body builds antibodies to protect itself from the disease. The risks of serious side effects are vanishingly small, unlike the dangers involved in contracting COVID-19.

Dr. Helard Ballón-Hennings, a local OB-GYN who practices with Women’s Health Associates of Southern Nevada, is among the health care providers urging healthy pregnant women to be vaccinated. In a video interview distributed by a local public relations firm, Ballon-Hennings confirms what other doctors say about the serious effects of COVID-19 on expectant mothers but adds that many suffer from the effects of long COVID — breathing problems, fatigue, fever, coughing, loss of taste and smell, and many other symptoms that can last for months.

Ballon-Hennings also cautioned that even mild cases of COVID-19 have negatively affected some women’s experiences as new moms, by forcing them to remain distant from their newborns while they’re still contagious.

“I have seen personally how these moms go into the labor room with something that they thought would be a unique and happy experience (but) end up having to be in an isolated experience and alone,” he said.

Untold numbers of women and their families have suffered these traumatic experiences needlessly, due in no small part to misinformation and disinformation coming from anti-vaccination extremists on the far right. This is one of several areas where Americans paid an extreme price, in many cases with their lives, for the unforgivable messaging coming from irresponsible politicians and figures in right-wing media.

Unfortunately, inconsistencies in messages coming from various government public health agencies early in the rollout of the vaccines also played into the hands of the anti-vaccination forces. For instance, in January the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended vaccinations for any pregnant woman who wanted one while the World Health Organization recommended that pregnant women not be given vaccines unless they had comorbidities or were otherwise at risk of a severe infection.

Eventually the messages would mesh up, but vaccine hesitancy among pregnant women had already taken hold.

Now, though, it can’t be stated often enough or strongly enough that the vaccines are safe for healthy women and their babies.

We join the health care providers sounding that message, and encouraging expectant mothers to see their doctor about the vaccination and following their recommendation.