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

“The Conversation” piece

We now come to the criticism by two academics in the Conversation, an outlet that has always consistently reflected the prevailing narrative.

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…