Should pregnant Bay Area women get the COVID-19 vaccine? [SFGate, San Francisco]
Dec. 21—While the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine has proven effective and safe for most, there’s still an important subset of people who were not included in clinical trials.
Pregnant women and women who are breastfeeding aren’t typically included in clinical trials of vaccines due to safety precautions. But for this particular vaccine, that’s left a lot of women wondering whether or not they should get the vaccine or wait for more data.
The absence of data is a problem, but Dr. Peter Klatsky, the Director of Fertility Preservation at the Bay Area’s Spring Fertility, said we should be getting more data from animals this month, which will likely be reassuring. “It will reassure me an awful lot if the protein expression is not seen on the placenta. That the mRNA isn’t making it to the placenta in animals,” he said. “I don’t expect to see any.”