Getting a COVID Vaccine while Pregnant Slashes Risk of Premature Birth, Major New Study Finds

Pregnant people who receive a COVID vaccine are 60 percent less likely to experience severe disease and around 30 percent less likely to give birth prematurely, according to new research

By Claire Cameron edited by Tanya Lewis

Woman is waiting to give birth at hospital — Virojt Changyencham/Getty Images

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Pregnant people who get a COVID vaccine are dramatically less likely to experience severe symptoms of the disease or to give birth prematurely, according to a comprehensive new study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Those who got the shot during pregnancy, rather than before they were pregnant, showed even lower odds of health complications. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that COVID vaccines are safe and beneficial across different populations. Despite that evidence, the Trump administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has removed the recommendation for pregnant people to get vaccinated against COVID, which Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has said he “couldn’t be more pleased” about.

Catching COVID while pregnant is especially risky, dramatically increasing the odds of serious disease and even death. Unvaccinated people are at greatest risk of grave outcomes.

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The new study, conducted in nearly 20,000 pregnant people in Canada, shows vaccinated pregnant people are about 60 percent less likely to be hospitalized and 90 percent less likely to require intensive care than unvaccinated people. In the Delta and Omicron waves, getting the shot was also respectively linked to a fifth and a third lower risk of having a preterm birth, which carries numerous health risks to the baby.

“Our findings provide clear, population-level evidence that COVID-19 vaccination protects pregnant people and their babies from serious complications,” said Deborah Money, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UBC and senior author of the study, in a recent statement.

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