Virus World

Infants born to people who had COVID while pregnant are at a higher risk of respiratory distress, but vaccination greatly lowers the risk. More than four years after the virus that causes COVID first appeared, scientists continue to discover new ways that the illness threatens pregnant people and babies—as well as additional evidence that vaccination offers significant protection. A new study finds that babies born to women who got COVID while they were pregnant were three times more likely to develop serious breathing problems than infants whose mothers didn’t have the disease during pregnancy, even if the infants weren’t infected themselves. Seventeen percent of the babies in the study who were exposed to COVID before birth developed respiratory distress, compared with only about 5 to 6 percent of newborns in the general population before the pandemic. The findings were published on Wednesday in Nature Communications....

Stucy cited (Jan. 24, 2023):

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44549-5 

The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines are effective in pregnant and lactating women, who can pass protective antibodies to newborns, according to research published Thursday in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard looked at 131 women who received either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. Among the participants, 84 were pregnant, 31 were lactating and 16 were not pregnant. Samples were collected between December 17, 2020 and March 2, 2021.  The vaccine-induced antibody levels were equivalent in pregnant and lactating women, compared to non-pregnant women. The antibody levels were "strikingly higher" than those resulting from coronavirus infection during pregnancy, the team noted. "These vaccines seem to work incredibly effectively in these women," said one of the researchers, Galit Alter, a professor of medicine at the Ragon Institute.