Vaccines, pregnancy, menstruation, lactation and fertility

 

                       

                 

The World Health Organization (WHO) has published an interview, which is important to Indian families. 
 https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/media-resources/science-in-5/episode-41---vaccines-pregnancy-menstruation-lactation-and-fertility.

I quote two question-answers below:
Vismita Gupta-Smith
Soumya, my first question to you is women who are breast feeding infants, what is the advice for them? Should they get vaccinated?
Dr Soumya Swaminathan

Yes, the answer is yes. So, women who have given birth and who are breastfeeding their babies can take the vaccine, should take the vaccine when it becomes available to them. There is no risk at all because all the vaccines that are being used presently, none of them have the live virus in it. And so there's no risk of transmission through the breast milk. In fact, the antibodies that the mother has can go through the breast milk to the baby and may only serve maybe to protect the baby a little bit. But there's absolutely no harm. It's very safe. And so women who are breastfeeding can definitely take the vaccines that are currently available.
Vismita Gupta-Smith
Soumya, what about women who are pregnant or are planning to get pregnant?
Dr Soumya Swaminathan
Yeah, that's really important because pregnancy, of course, is a very special situation because we are concerned about the health of the mother, but also about the health of the foetus, the unborn child. And so any drug or vaccine that is administered during pregnancy, we always take special care to make sure that, you know, there is no potential safety concern or any adverse event. In the case of COVID, we know that pregnant women are at higher risk of getting severe COVID and also at higher risk of delivering a baby prematurely. So, in situations where there is a lot of COVID transmission in the country and a woman is exposed to it, or if she's in a profession like a health care worker or a frontline worker where she's at especially high risk of acquiring the infection, the benefits of getting the vaccine definitely outweigh the risks, particularly since the platforms that we used currently for vaccines are the mRNA platform, inactivated viruses or the viral vectored platforms or subunit proteins. None of them have a live virus that can multiply within the body and that could potentially create a problem. So, I think it's important that pregnant women in every country be explained the benefits versus the risks and be offered the vaccine if they would like to take it. And it's probably the right thing to do in many situations, as I said, where the pregnant woman is at higher risk of getting the infection and where the vaccines would bring more benefits.

My own comment

Should not India encourage families to defer pregnancies this year? Times of India carried the following story today in its Bengaluru edition:

Bengaluru: 17 Covid-19 positive women died post-delivery in the second wave

Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/83230148.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

We read tragic stories of mothers infected by Covid delivering babies by Caesarian Section. This is often unavoidable, to save the infant’s life. It is not uncommon for the mother to die within a week or ten days after delivering the child. These mothers were obviously below 45, and so could not get a free vaccination, not even a paid vaccination, in many cities and towns. It must have been worse in villages.  

Should we not adopt "Covid-appropriate behavior" and avert these tragedies?

Srinivasan Ramani
4-June-2021