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Pregnancy and COVID-19 Vaccines
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A local news station is promoting the idea that the World Health Organization is recommending that pregnant women do not get the COVID-19 vaccine.
The facts:
Even though pregnant women are not included in clinical trials, it's important to keep in mind that pregnancy recently published study showed a 3.5 increase in hospitalization and a 13 times increase in deaths among COVID-19 positive people who are pregnant.
Because the mRNA in the currently available vaccines is easily broken down by the body after your cells use its instructions to make spike proteins, it is highly unlikely that any part of the vaccine could cross placenta and reach a fetus.
Several governmental and professional organizations have promoted the idea that pregnant women should get the COVID-19 vaccine: ACOG, CDC, NACI (Canada), NHS (Scotland). Many of these recommendations take into account the level of COVID-19 circulation in a community.
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Race and Informed Consent
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A campaign by a prominent anti-vaxxer seeks to sow doubt in BIPOC communities by equating vaccination with "medical apartheid" and by intimating that BIPOC communities are experimented upon without informed consent.
The facts:
The shame of abuse of the Tuskegee syphilis or Henrietta Lacks has led to reforms in how we conduct medical experiments, making them more ethical and the oversight of them more robust. Getting informed consent from volunteers enrolling in clinical trials is something that is taken seriously.
Conspiracies that would use unwitting human subjects in vaccine trials would be mathematically impossible to keep secret. We would already know such a nefarious scheme were it real, and continuing to be transparent about how clinical trials work is critical.
Meanwhile, anti-vaccine activists are actively targeting BIPOC communities hoping to exploit honest skepticism in government with their own conspiratorial thinking in order to sow further mistrust, ignoring the fact that these communities have been the subject of disproportionate death and hospitalization from COVID-19.
Trust in a system that has done real harm is hard to rebuild, so healthcare workers who are people of color have also gone public supporting the vaccine and explaining how they went from distrust to trust.
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Another meme is circulating claiming to show an alarming number of deaths following the COVID-19 vaccine.
The facts:
This meme relies on VAERS, a passive adverse event reporting system operating by the CDC and FDA where anyone can report a suspected reaction to a vaccine. As stated on the VAERS website, "VAERS is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem." The purpose of VAERS is to help public health officials detect patterns of possible reactions for further investigation.
There are reasons to doubt that these deaths are related to vaccination. Some even state that the person making the report does not think they are related, some deaths occurred many days to weeks after vaccination, and many occurred in the elderly or people with significant underlying conditions (such as terminal lung cancer). But even if these deaths were related to the vaccine, out of the 22 million vaccines given, less than 1 in 150,000 died afterwards, which is far lower than the expected mortality rate in the United States.
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Vaccine Fact of the Week to Share
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Are you getting a COVID-19 vaccine? You are the shareable!
Upload your selfies to our website and share those that have been shared on our Facebook and Instagram pages!
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