Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as some doctors, say that fewer pregnant women are getting influenza and other vaccines this year.
The CDC study also found that 47.2 percent of expectant mothers received influenza vaccines last year, which is down from 57.5 percent who got them during the 2019-2020 season---before the COVID-19 pandemic and mass vaccination campaigns.
“Findings from this survey indicate that approximately one-half of pregnant women have not received influenza or Tdap vaccines, and only one-quarter received both vaccines,” the CDC paper said, referring to the vaccine for tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis.
It added: “Influenza vaccination coverage remains low and is [at least] 10 percentage points lower than during the 2019–20 season, consistent with other data sources that have shown decreases in influenza vaccination coverage among pregnant women since the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Of the 1,252 women pregnant at the time of the survey, 27.3 percent received the bivalent, or updated, COVID-19 booster shot before or during their pregnancy, according to the CDC. Of that figure, about 65 percent reported getting at least one initial COVID-19 vaccine dose, and 58.7 percent said they completed the primary vaccination series, showing the 27.9 percent figure is a significant drop-off in vaccine update.
One doctor, Denise Jamieson, vice president for medical affairs at the University of Iowa Health Care, told NBC News this week, “The number of women vaccinated for COVID is disappointing,” in response to the CDC’s data.
“We are meeting more resistance than I ever remember,” Dr. Neil Silverman, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at UCLA Health, told NBC. “We didn’t get this kind of pushback on this scale before the pandemic.”
He said that “now all vaccines are lumped together as ‘bad.’”
“Yeah, I think it’s been noticed across the country,” Dr. Anna Euser, a maternal and fetal medicine physician at the UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital, told Denver news outlet 9 News, referring to the drop in pregnant women getting the vaccines.
“Since COVID, there was a lot of questioning of different therapies and treatments and a lot of questioning about the COVID vaccine with it being new technology,” she said. “That has carried over .... to questioning of other vaccines that we’ve used for much longer periods of time.”
Another doctor who spoke to NBC, Linda Eckert with the University of Washington, said that “there’s a bias that some patients have, more than they used to, about how they feel about a vaccine.”
According to Dr. Linda Eckert, an OB-GYN and global health and immunization expert at the University of Washington, “There’s a bias that some patients have, more than they used to, about how they feel about a vaccine.” When the doctor broaches the topic of vaccines with pregnant women, they respond with, “I’m not going to talk about it,” she said.
Other Data
Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the latest bivalent shots from Novavax, Moderna, and Pfizer before they were recommended by the CDC. But the most recent data from the federal agency shows that about 2 percent, or 7 million, Americans have received the latest shots.“COVID-19 vaccine distribution, which has shifted to the private market, is a lot different than it was last year when the government was distributing them,” said a spokesperson for HHS about the recent vaccination data. The spokesperson added that the CDC and other federal agencies are working “directly with manufacturers and distributors to ensure that the vaccines are getting to” various locations across the United States.
It added that 91 percent of Americans aged 12 years and older “can access the vaccine within 5 miles of where they live,” adding that 14 million updated boosters for COVID-19 have been shipped to pharmacies and other places.
Data has shown that about 17 percent of the U.S. population got the updated booster vaccine, or around 56.5 million people.
