Health Council changes advice on corona vaccination for pregnant women

In a new advice, the Health Council’s vaccination subcommittee of March 27, 2024 recommends that vaccination against Covid-19 no longer be offered as standard to all pregnant women. According to the committee, the added value of vaccination is currently low.

The Doctors Collective is pleased that the Health Council has amended this advice and appears to have listened to the concerns of midwives.

The advice for healthcare workers remains valid, with the well-known ‘you do it for the other’ as the most important argument. However, the corona vaccines have never been studied for protection against virus transmission. They only work to a very limited extent in the current situation with great (natural) immunity. But the risk of serious side effects from the current mRNA corona vaccines remains the same or conceivably increases due to repeated exposure to the toxic (5) spike protein.

Safe for pregnant women?

Questions also remain about the Health Council’s statement that the safety of vaccination during pregnancy “has been demonstrated in many studies”.

In its advice, the Health Council substantiates the safety for pregnant women and their babies with four scientific articles (1-4). Below we discuss the very poor evidence for the safety of the corona vaccines for this target group.

The biggest problem with these studies is that they are all retrospective, looking back. Not a single double-blind randomized placebo-controlled study has been conducted to test the safety and effectiveness of the corona vaccines for pregnant women and their babies.

What problems does this cause? For example, the studies may suffer from the so-called “healthy vaccine effect”. This means that people who get vaccinated may have better health for all kinds of other reasons than people who do not get vaccinated, which means that both safety and effectiveness can be assessed too positively. In one of the studies, this effect is very likely, because the vaccines appear to protect against all kinds of non-Covid-related complaints. The authors (3) themselves write:

The higher neonatal mortality (2.0 and 1.6/1000, respectively) found herein among pregnant individuals who were not vaccinated during pregnancy may reflect a greater likelihood of adverse neonatal mortality risk factors associated with lower socio-economic status and worse living conditions than average.

And:

Confounding the study results due to vaccinated individuals being healthier may have contributed to the lower neonatal morbidity and mortality associated with Covid-19 vaccination during pregnancy.

In some studies (2), vaccinated women do so much better than the historical average that a healthy vaccine effect is very likely.

A number of other comments regarding the safety studies for pregnant women follow below.

• Authors of one of the studies (2) rate their study results as ‘low to very low strength of evidence'(“low to very low to the certainty of evidence”).
• The safety studies have a short follow-up time. For example the pregnancy loss and neonatal outcomes of a systematic review, which included only one study, (Shimabukuro et al.), reporting multiple pregnancy outcomes. This study was published very shortly after the start of vaccinating pregnant women and has problems with transparency and a high rate of spontaneous miscarriage.
• Also, in terms of safety, one of the studies (3) examined only a small number of symptoms in children, namely symptoms that were known as side effects in adults, sometimes after multiple injections. But very different side effects could occur in babies, such as a reduction in stem cells or changes in the microbiome (see: https://www.bchr.ca/news/covid-19-vaccines-gut-microbiome-dietary-fibre and https ://journals.lww.com/ajg/Fulltext/2022/10002/S2099_Persistent_Damage_to_the_Gut_Microbiome.2099.aspx). These types of side effects have not been looked at.
• The most recent study (4) writes:
  “Overall, certainty about the pooled evidence was low, due to serious doubts about the consistency, precision and directness of the estimated synthesized effect.”
• What should also be noted is that some assumptions in the studies cited by the Health Council are already outdated, such as the assumption that the mRNA vaccines cannot cross the placenta (3). This has recently been demonstrated. It is also relevant that the mRNA corona vaccine has also been found in breast milk of vaccinated mothers, so that babies can be exposed through different routes.

If we summarize the literature provided by the Health Council, we must conclude that there is no strong evidence for the safety of the corona vaccines for pregnant women and the child, and that sometimes the evidence is wafer-thin.

Indications of unsafety for pregnancy

There are indications that indicate a negative role of mRNA vaccines in particular for fertility.

That is why the Doctors Collective previously advocated stopping corona vaccinations in pregnant women until adequate, independent safety studies have been completed and published, including genotoxic and reproductive studies in animal models. In addition, its for a good risk/benefit adequate, independent effectiveness studies are also needed.

References:

1. Fu W, Sivajohan B, McClymont E, Albert A, Elwood C, Ogilvie G, et al. Systematic review of the safety, immunogenicity, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant and lactating individuals and their infants. Int J Gynaecol Obstet 2022; 156(3): 406-417.
2. Ciapponi A, Berrueta M, PKP E, Bardach A, Mazzoni A, Anderson SA, et al. Safety of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Vaccine 2023; 41(25): 3688-3700.
3. Norman M, Magnus MC, Soderling J, Juliusson PB, Naver L, Ortqvist AK, et al. Neonatal Outcomes After COVID-19 Vaccination in Pregnancy. Jama 2024; 331(5): 396-407.
4. Rimmer MP, Teh JJ, Mackenzie SC, Al Wattar BH. The risk of miscarriage following COVID-19 vaccination: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Hum Reprod 2023; 38(5): 840-852
5. Schwartz L, Aparicio-Alonso M, Henry M, Radman M, Attal R, Bakkar A. Toxicity of the spike protein of COVID-19 is a redox shift phenomenon: A novel therapeutic approach. Free Radic Biol Med. 2023 Sep;206:106-110. doi: 10.1016/j.freeradbiomed.2023.05.034. Epub 2023 Jun 29. Erratum in: Free Radic Biol Med. 2023 Jul 27;207:226. PMID: 37392949.

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