Potential for 'massive oversight' of women’s reproductive rights in Covid-19 vaccine rollout plans
Pregnant and lactating healthcare, frontline, and educational workers will likely be recommended not to take the vaccine. File Picture: Pexels
Pregnant healthcare, education, and frontline services workers may be excluded from Government Covid-19 vaccine rollout plans due to the lack of safety trials on the vaccines’ impacts on pregnancy, fertility, and lactation.
Care-home staff and frontline healthcare workers are amongst the first due for the jab when it arrives on Irish shores, according to a provisional Vaccine Allocation Strategy approved by Nphet and signed off on by Cabinet on Tuesday.
However, the plan lists “pregnant women” as a separate and final category, alongside children.
Pregnant and lactating healthcare, frontline, and educational workers will likely be recommended not to take the vaccine.
Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, currently being rolled out in the UK, is untested for safety amongst pregnant and lactating women, no animal trials into reproductive toxicity have been completed, and no tests on the impacts of the vaccine on fertility have been conducted. The same goes for Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines.
Safety information released by the UK’s medicines regulator to medical staff administering the Pfizer vaccine states women should not be vaccinated if they are pregnant or lactating. It also says women should avoid pregnancy for three months during and after the two-shot vaccination process.
“Pregnant women and children were not part of the cohorts tested during the current candidate Covid-19 vaccine trials, therefore there are no safety data for the administration of these vaccines in those cohorts at this time,” the Irish Department of Health confirmed in an emailed statement.
Vaccines for Ireland are still awaiting authorisation from the European Medicines Agency, and the overall strategy and implementation plan is still being finalised, the email said.
However, a maternity rights organisation has said that the provisional allocation plan represents a “lack of joined-up thinking” regarding women’s reproductive rights and workers’ rights.
“We now have a large cohort of people who, for their own safety, the safety of their fertility, and the safety of their babies, are prevented from taking a vaccine,” said Association for Improvement in Maternity Services (Aims) chairperson Dr Krysia Lynch.
“If you include all those breastfeeding, planning pregnancy, or who will become pregnant without planning a pregnancy, that’s a very sizable cohort with a huge overlap with those who provide our frontline services, who are top of the list to be vaccinated.”
Dr Lynch said the absence of safety data amounted to a “massive oversight” when it came to women’s reproductive rights.
“It’s incredible that during the fast-tracking of this vaccine, no-one raised this issue that this vaccine isn’t suitable for people planning a pregnancy, for people who might accidentally get pregnant, for people who want to conceive in coming years, for people who are breastfeeding, for people who are between pregnancies,” said Dr Lynch.
As well as impacting the rights of pregnant workers across many sectors, Dr Lynch said the lack of research left knock-on impacts in other areas of women’s reproductive rights, such as planning for future families.
“Having to decide to prioritise your immediate health by opting for a vaccine, or prioritise your fertility by planning a pregnancy: that’s a large decision to make and there isn’t enough information there for people to make that decision,” she said.
Given the lack of safety studies on pregnancy, fertility, and lactation, Ms Lynch said the “rhetoric with respect to the vaccine needs to change to reflect risks it may present to a very large population in this country.”
Any attempt to make Covid-19 vaccination mandatory, or to restrict access to services such as travel for people who opt out of taking the vaccine due to pregnancy, lactation, or fertility concerns would be discriminatory and could leave women “excluded from rights only afforded to those who can prove positive uptake of the vaccination, as well as from the positive effects of vaccination,” she said.
A spokesperson for Pfizer’s corporate affairs department said recommendations as to which groups should be vaccinated were drawn up by the relevant jurisdiction’s health regulator on the basis of the company’s research, and that Pfizer did not itself make such recommendations.
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