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The cost-effectiveness of vaccinating pregnant or lactating women against SARS-CoV-2 - Part 3

The cost-effectiveness of vaccinating pregnant or lactating women against SARS-CoV-2 - Part 3

“The Conversation” piece

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Tom Jefferson
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Carl Heneghan
Nov 30, 2024
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The cost-effectiveness of vaccinating pregnant or lactating women against SARS-CoV-2 - Part 3
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We now come to the criticism by two academics in the Conversation, an outlet that has always consistently reflected the prevailing narrative.

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The authors are concerned by the proposed withdrawal of Covid vaccination to pregnant women from the spring of 2025 for several reasons:

Pregnant women are at higher risk of Covid infection.

Their evidence for this is a nonsystematic review by Gao et al., which lists “physiological changes” in pregnancy in the first trimester as making them more susceptible to Covid. In turn, Gao et al. cite a 2020 US CDC paper by Ellington et al.

Ellington et al. report surveillance on 325,335 women aged 15-44 who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, 28% of whom had data on pregnancy status, and 9% were pregnant.

No information on viral load is reported, and much is made of the severity of the disease: “Hospitalization was reported by a substantially higher percentage of pregnant women (31.5%) than nonpregnant women (5.8%) (Table 2). Data were not available to distinguis…

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