Covid-19 Vaccine Pregnancy Safety

Mainstream media promotes research claims of absolute safety, efficacy, and necessity. Alternative news sources and social media anecdotal reports claim the exact opposite. What should we do? Caution!

Pregnant women in the Philippines were placed on the Covid-19 Vaccine Priority list last August 2021, with the Department of Health latest update here.

In the Philippines, DOH advised that despite there being limited data on pregnant women from clinical studies, pregnant women are considered eligible for all covid-19 vaccines, except for the Gamelaya Vaccine, although preferably after the 1st trimester of pregnancy.

Pharmacovigilance reporting in the Philippines does include reports of adverse reactions in pregnant women. As of 24th April 2022, 439 reports had been received from pregnant women, with 240 tagged as serious and 199 tagged as non-serious:-

There is no data available in the report on whether any of these serious reactions included fatal outcomes. To get a response on this an FOI Request (#DOH-117950138337 dated 31st March 2022), was submitted. At that time there were 321 adverse reactions, including 164 serious events reported for pregnant women. The FOI response was that these serious reports included 2 deaths of the pregnant mother, but that both of these were assessed as coincidental.

Is there any concern for reproductive health / pregnancy outcomes in other international Pharmacovigilance systems?

The Australian DAEN has pregnancy loss, fetal loss, and stillbirth reports.

The US VAERS system contains many reports which include menstrual disorders, miscarriages and still births, with the following taken from openvaers. Note that although this finding doesn’t imply causation, I would have thought that these reports should have raised a signal of concern. Apparently not!

The WHO VigiAccess System currently has 3,720,381 reports of adverse drug reactions related to Covid-19 Vaccine. Of these 201,118 are listed as “reproductive system and breast disorders” and 10,846 are listed as “pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions”. Clearly reports of adverse reactions are not limited to Philippines and the US.

I tried to research pregnancy outcomes and covid-19 vaccination. I would have thought, more than 2 years into the pandemic and 15+ months into vaccine rollout, that we should have already had comprehensive pregnancy and early neonatal safety and outcome data available.

However, there are surprisingly few readily accessible studies, and those I found seem to present universally positive and reassuring findings. One retrospective cohort study of 4,399 Israeli Women whose deliveries were followed between January and June of 2021, published in October 2021, claims no adverse effects on pregnancy course and outcomes. Necessarily, being retrospective this study only included women who gave birth, and thus outcomes which did not result in delivery of a baby were not captured! US CDC also continues to promote these vaccines. John Hopkins also promotes the vaccines as safe, effective, and necessary (Feb 2022).

On the other hand, truth warriors like Dr. Naomi Wolf are crying an alarm, and individuals in my social media feed are decrying devastating outcomes with tragic images of lost loved ones to boot.

Pfizer's information states no pregnancy studies! So clearly we must rely on others than the manufacturer!

As a consumer, what should I believe? The official published captured “scientific” narrative, and the pharmacovigilance reports which still claim no alarm, or those anecdotal reports in social media? The government or the truth warriors who are crying an alarm?

Birthrates in the Philippines have shown a steady decline over the past 2 years. Covid-19 vaccines cannot be significantly implicated yet in the current data because vaccination of pregnant women only began in August of 2021, and Data for the last quarter of 2021 is still incomplete. Here are our current Philippines population birth rate data for the past 3 years (November - December may still improve in final data). A seriously concerning drop in live registered births in 2021 vs 2019 of nearly 1000 a day!

Given the criticality of healthy population growth to the country’s future, the Philippines cannot afford any factor negatively impacting population growth.

If there is an impact from C-19 vaccination on birth rates, it must be identified as early as possible. I dare to suggest that public health policy related to vaccination of pregnant women may need to be amended to err on the side of caution!

Time to halt vaccine rollout?