The U.K. vaccine advisory committee issued a rapid response letter declaring that pregnant women do not need to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
The decision, announced on November 20, was made during the committee’s October 2 meeting.
“Current NHS advice is that pregnant individuals should be offered four vaccines: ADACEL (whooping cough, diphtheria and tetanus), COVID-19, and influenza and RSV (seasonally),” the rapid response letter, published in The BMJ, reads. “The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) decided at its October 2024 meeting that ‘it did not advise that pregnant individuals be eligible for COVID-19 vaccination in Autumn 2025 and Spring 2026.'”
“According to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), from October 2022 to December 2023 there were no ICU admissions or deaths from COVID-19 recorded in pregnant individuals (in any trimester) and that just over 13,000 pregnant individuals would need to be vaccinated to prevent one ‘severe hospital admission’ of a baby under three months of age.”
Unlike the U.K., entities in the United States continue advising COVID-19 vaccines.
The CDC recommends that “everyone ages 6 months and older” get the inoculation vaccine, including “people who are pregnant, breastfeeding a baby, trying to get pregnant now, or who might become pregnant in the future.”
Last year, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) asked Dr. Kimberly Biss, an OB-GYN who had been involved with 8,000 pregnancies, how many pregnant women experienced miscarriages after receiving the COVID-19 vaccines.
“How many of your patients or pregnant women that you know of experience miscarriages after taking the COVID-19 vaccines — or injections?” Greene asked.
“I’ve never seen this before,” Biss responded, noting that patients inoculated in 2021 and 2022 are still having a “lingering effect.”
In 2020, Biss said that the miscarriage was about 4%. The number nearly doubled in 2021 to be between 7%-8%. In 2022, the miscarriage rate doubled again, rising to 15%.
