The Canadian National Vaccine Safety Network collected data from 191,360 vaccinated women aged 15 to 49 between December 2020 and November 2021. The researchers asked participants to report “significant health events” that were serious enough to cause them to miss school or work, seek medical attention, or disrupt their routine. Of the 5,597 pregnant participants, 4 percent reported a major health event within seven days of receiving the first dose of mRNA vaccine, and 7.3 percent of the 3,108 pregnant respondents said they had side effects from their second shots. Among those who were not pregnant, 6.3 percent of the 174,765 respondents reported a major health event after the first dose, and 11.3 percent of the 10,254 participants said they felt sick after the second dose. Dr. Julie Bettinger, senior author on the paper published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, says the findings are “unexpected” and warrant further research. “Previous studies of other vaccines in pregnant women have mostly reported no significant differences in health events between pregnant and non-pregnant women or found higher rates in pregnancy,” Bettinger, a researcher at BC Children’s Hospital, said in a news release Thursday. “Further studies of non-COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are needed to determine whether the reduced side effects seen in pregnant women in this study are a feature of the mRNA vaccine platform or of these specific vaccines.” This report by The Canadian Press was first published on August 12, 2022.
