Florida doctors are pleading forpregnant women to go get vaccinated against COVID-19.- "If for no other reason, if you love that baby, please go get vaccinated," local ICU Dr. Sunil Kumar said.
- Data show that "if the mom is vaccinated the antibodies can be transmitted over to the baby," he said.
Florida doctors are pleading for pregnant women to go get vaccinated against COVID-19 as
Data show that "if the mom is vaccinated the antibodies can be transmitted over to the baby," Broward Health Medical Center ICU Dr. Sunil Kumar said during a press conference Tuesday. He pleaded to unvaccinated expectant mothers: "If for no other reason, if you love that baby, please go get vaccinated."
Kumar was among a group of Florida healthcare workers who urged pregnant women to get the jab, WPLG Local 10 reported.
Recently, an unvaccinated woman died due to complications with COVID-19 after she gave birth to a baby boy, crushing Kumar and Dr. Adolfo Gonzalez-Garcia, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Broward Health Medical Center, according to the
"This baby will never know his mother and this woman never saw her child and that's so, so sad and it should never happen," Gonzalez-Garcia said at the press conference.
The doctors believe the mother would still be alive if she had been inoculated against COVID-19.
Increasing data suggests the vaccines are safe and effective in pregnancy
When the vaccine rollout began in the US, medical organizations largely left the decision to get vaccinated up to pregnant women, due to limited research. That put patients and clinicians in a difficult position.
Since then, more than 100,000 people have gotten vaccinated during pregnancy, and no red flags have been raised. Data from three safety monitoring systems didn't find safety concerns for vaccinated pregnant people or their babies.
Most recently, the CDC revealed a new analysis finding no increased risk of miscarriage among nearly 2,500 pregnant women who received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine before 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Another recent study showed that pregnant people with COVID-19 have far higher rates of adverse birth outcomes compared to healthy pregnant patients. The researchers found that the 18,715 patients who had COVID-19 were more than five times as likely to be admitted to the ICU, more than 14 times as likely to need intubation or mechanical ventilation, and more than 15 times as likely to die.
Women with COVID-19 were also about 40% more likely to deliver prematurely.
CDC: Vaccinating pregnant people 'has never been more urgent'
That data, coupled with the dangers of the Delta variant and low rates of vaccination among pregnant people, led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to urge pregnant women to get the coronavirus vaccine earlier this month. Doing so has "has never been more urgent," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine had already changed its tune, advising providers to "enthusiasticually recommend vaccination" to pregnant people on June 30.
"It is clear that pregnant people need to feel confident in the decision to choose vaccination, and a strong recommendation from their obstetrician-gynecologist could make a meaningful difference for many pregnant people," their joint statement says.