For the first time, four vaccinations, including new RSV jabs, are advised during pregnancy. Doctors assert that they are ready to combat anti-vaccine propaganda.
This is the first year that four immunizations are advised during pregnancy as the winter respiratory infection season quickly approaches. The risk of serious disease or death in both pregnant women and their unborn children is rising, however, as there are already indications that fewer of them are getting vaccinated.
Dr. Neil Silverman, an expert in maternal-fetal medicine at UCLA Health, stated, “We are encountering more resistance than I ever remember.” “We didn’t get this kind of pushback on this scale before the pandemic.”
“Now all vaccines are lumped together as ‘bad,'” added the politician.
For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised pregnant women to receive the RSV vaccine in September to guard against a virus that, while typically mild in healthy adults, can be severe for children under the age of five. According to the revised recommendations, pregnant women should have four vaccinations to stave off the flu, whooping cough, pertussis, and the respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.
A recent CDC analysis, however, revealed rising skepticism regarding vaccination during pregnancy.
Nearly a quarter of the nearly 2,000 pregnant women who were in the height of the previous year’s cold and flu season or around the time the survey was taken in March and April said they were “very hesitant” about getting a flu shot.
This is a substantial improvement above the 17.2% who claimed to have the same degree of reservations during the respiratory sickness season in 2021–2022.
Fewer pregnant women are now immunized against influenza and other infections as a result of this hesitation.
Dr. Denise Jamieson, vice president for medical affairs at the University of Iowa Health Care and a representative for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, stated that getting pregnant women immunized was difficult even before the pandemic. Since then, suspicion of vaccinations has grown exponentially and spread to routine flu shots, which have been administered to millions of pregnant women over a period of decades with no signs of unfavorable side effects.
According to the CDC data, only 47.2% of expectant mothers received their flu vaccines last year, compared to 57.5% who did so before the start of the 2019–20 flu season.
Only 27.3% of women received the Covid booster before or during pregnancy last season, when omicron infections flooded hospitals, just over half of women (55.4%) had their Tdap vaccinations. Since 2011, the Tdap vaccine, which safeguards infants against tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis, has been advised during pregnancy.
“Tdap is just barely recovering from pre-pandemic levels,” Jamieson stated. “The number of women vaccinated for Covid is disappointing.”
There is a bias that some patients have regarding how they feel about a vaccine, more so than they used to, according to Dr. Linda Eckert, an OB-GYN and global health and immunization expert at the University of Washington. More of Eckert’s pregnant patients are now responding, “I’m not going to talk about it,” she added, when she advises them to get a vaccine.
What expecting mothers should know about vaccinations
Experts assert that pregnant women are wired to examine everything they put in their bodies, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
“That intuition is sound. Dr. Jodie Dionne, associate director of Global Health at the Center for Women’s Reproductive Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, described it as protective mothering. “We actually want women to question what they’re putting in their body.”
There are other fallacies out there, what Dr. Melissa Simon, an OB-GYN at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, called “blatant disinformation” that is not supported by research and is intended to be more politically charged.
According to Dionne, the only way doctors can properly address these worries is to “create an open atmosphere where they feel comfortable telling you what they’re worried about.”
The CDC report’s primary result is that women were less reluctant to be vaccinated when obstetricians or other physicians discussed the necessity of doing so.
“A lot more people are vaccine hesitant than anti-vaccine,” said Eckert. “Vaccine hesitant individuals tend to be curious.”
When Covid shots became “crucial,” doctors honed their abilities to manage patients’ vaccine worries, according to Dr. Sarah Pachtman, a maternal/fetal doctor at Northwell Health’s Katz Women’s Hospital of Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, New York.
She remarked, “We’ve had so much practice,” and added that this year, compared to before the epidemic, she has encountered less vaccine hesitation.
“I noticed myself spending more time counseling patients,” she stated. “That helps decrease their hesitancy.”
Flu and Covid can be harmful to pregnant women.
The belly grows during pregnancy, pressing against the diaphragm and reducing lung capacity. According to Simon, this increases the risk of breathing problems in pregnant women, particularly those who are late in their pregnancies.
“When an infection like RSV or Covid or influenza gets into that lung space, it’s even harder for people who are pregnant to breathe,” she stated.
One of the groups most vulnerable to problems from the virus is pregnant women. Preterm births and other difficulties are made more likely by covid use during pregnancy.