Expectant mothers who get a Covid-19 vaccine while pregnant pass immune protection on to their newborns, findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed Tuesday.
The chances that a baby 6 months old or younger is hospitalized due to Covid are 61 percent lower if the mother received two shots of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine while pregnant, the CDC’s Dr. Dana Meaney-Delman said.
Researchers studied newborns at 20 pediatric hospitals across 17 states from July 1, 2021, through Jan. 17.
The results showed that 84 percent of the babies hospitalized with Covid had been born to unvaccinated mothers. The study included 43 infants admitted to an ICU with Covid, and found that 88 percent of them had mothers who did not get vaccinated before giving birth.
“The bottom line is that maternal vaccination is a really important way to help protect these young ones,” Meaney-Delman told reporters. That’s especially important, she added, given that vaccines for this young cohort are not yet on the horizon.The CDC study did not evaluate the effects of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine on newborns, nor did it look at booster shots given during pregnancy. But Dr. Manish Patel, the study’s lead author, said the agency hopes to gather and release data on boosters in the future.
“From all of the evidence on boosters increasing protection, antibody levels, we should see higher protection definitely and not lower protection with boosters,” Patel said.
The data also seemed to indicate that babies born to mothers who were inoculated later in their pregnancies had even less risk of Covid hospitalization than babes whose mothers got their shots early in pregnancy.
But Meaney-Delman said the CDC is not changing its recommendations to encourage any women to wait for a late-term vaccine or booster. Pregnant women face a higher risk of severe illness from a coronavirus infection, and recent research has shown that the virus can attack and destroy the placenta, leading to stillbirth.
In the U.S., people ages 5 and up are eligible for vaccination against the virus, which has killed more than 926,000 Americans.
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