Pregnant women should get Covid-19 vaccine, maternity expert says

An American study found pregnant women who had Covid-19 were at higher risk of serious illness, hospitalisation and death.

Professor Shane Higgins, master of the National Maternity Hospital, has said that pregnant women should strongly consider getting the Covid-19 vaccine.

Prof Higgins was responding to an American study that found pregnant women who had Covid-19 were at higher risk of serious illness, hospitalisation, and death.

However, he told Newstalk Breakfast there was a “stark difference” in Ireland, he said where pregnant women were effectively cocooning, isolating, and taking the virus very seriously.

While the international evidence to date was that pregnant patients were at greater risk of hospitalisation with an increased risk of pre-term birth, that was not the experience among the maternity population in Ireland, he said.

"We’ve delivered nearly 7,000 babies since the start of the pandemic here at the National Maternity Hospital," Prof Higgins said.

We’ve had just over 80 positive cases and they’ve all done very well.

Any positive cases had been very mild with very few of them symptomatic, he added.

The availability of vaccines had raised new concerns for expectant parents, acknowledged Prof Higgins, but the evidence was mounting that vaccines were safe for pregnant women in high-risk groups.

All the evidence would suggest that if a woman had a high-risk pregnancy then she should “strongly consider” getting the vaccine, he said.

“My advice is that when the vaccine becomes available to any pregnant woman, she should consider strongly getting it.

"It's a non-live vaccine, and it's been recommended across the world that high-risk pregnant women should get it.”