A new Canadian study suggests that pregnant people experienced lower rates of health problems after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine than their counterparts who weren’t pregnant.
The Canadian National Vaccine Safety Network collected data from 191,360 vaccinated women aged 15 to 49 between December 2020 and November 2021.
The researchers asked participants to report “significant health events” that were serious enough to make them miss school or work, seek medical attention or disrupt their routines.
Of 5,597 pregnant participants, four per cent reported a significant health event within seven days of receiving their first dose of an mRNA vaccine, and 7.3 per cent of 3,108 pregnant respondents said they had side-effects from their second shots.
Among those who weren’t pregnant, 6.3 per cent of 174,765 respondents reported a significant health event after dose one, and 11.3 per cent of 10,254 participants said they felt sick after dose two.
Dr. Julie Bettinger, senior author on the paper published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, says the findings are “unexpected” and warrant further investigation.
“Previous studies on other vaccines in pregnant women have mostly reported no significant differences in health events between pregnant and non-pregnant women or have found higher rates in pregnancy,” Bettinger, an investigator at BC Children’s Hospital, said in a news release Thursday.
“Further studies of non-COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are required to identify if the reduced side-effects observed in pregnant people in this study is a feature of the mRNA vaccine platform, or of these specific vaccines.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 12, 2022.
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