However, there’s one peculiar caveat to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine— and to other major vaccine trials, too: none included pregnant women in their clinical trials. Indeed, not one of the vaccines expected to be approved by the FDA in the next couple weeks, including the Pfizer/BioNTech one, have been tested on pregnant women directly, leaving a cohort of people who are vulnerable to COVID-19 with no direct information on how the vaccine will affect them or their fetuses.
“We don’t know anything directly about the safety of the vaccine in pregnant or in lactating persons because they were all excluded from the vaccine trials,” Dr. Melissa Simon, Director of the Center for Health Equity Transformation at Northwestern’s Center at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told Salon in a phone interview. “The only thing that could have possibly happened, which we won’t know until the data are unblinded, is if any of the participants in the vaccine trials got pregnant during the course of participating in the trial.”
The exclusion speaks to a long-lived trend in America’s healthcare system, in which pregnant women are actively excluded from the clinical vaccine trials and critical research in healthcare.
Correct. We don’t test drugs on pregnant women. Because we don’t know. In fact, drug tests are largely to overwhelmingly upon male subjects because we don’t want to go testing on pregnant women nor women who might become pregnant during the trial. Because – we don’t know.
We’d sorta like to avoid the two deaths for the price of one thing as – and they will at times – things go wrong. That’s when we’re not pondering how the hormonal changes of pregnancy make wider application of lessons learned a tad difficult.
And the fun bit is, she’d be the first one up the Barricades if pregnant women were to be included, because Risk to the Unborn Child…
Pregnant women are part of a long list of conditions that prevent people from becoming/volunteering as a test subject, including smoking, alcoholism, serious allergies, anything remotely smelling of autoimmune disease or chronic infection, etc. And yes, in many cases in preliminary tests, being female at all, because of hormone swings throwing results off.
Since, after all, you want to establish a baseline first before you start checking up on the exceptions.
Of course we’ll now get the uncontrolled trial of the vaccine in some pregnant women, even though they are supposed to avoid it. I hope the ante-natal people note and track it, always assuming the woman is truthful.
And the fun bit is, she’d be the first one up the Barricades if pregnant women were to be included, because Risk to the Unborn Child…
Nah, this is Salon, I doubt any sector of society is less bothered about foetal wellbeing.
Send the pregnant women to Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital and see how long they last. Envy of the world my arse.
Isn’t there a specific issue anyway with regards to this mRNA vaccine and pregnant women? Something to do with a spike protein in the vaccine mirrors one used by the body to create the placenta and thus it could end up ‘teaching’ the body to attack its own placenta?
Pregnancy isn’t a permanant affliction, wait until you’re not pregnant. I couldn’t give blood for a year because I was full of post-operative drugs, you wait until it’s over.
Has this idiot woman never heard of the thalidomide babies? Or is abortion so ingrained in the culture now that if something did happen to the fetus it’s just a shrug, oops, and a D&C? I wonder if she’d change her tune if the possible danger was to the woman, and not the fetus. Still – with all the biochemical changes going on in a pregnant woman’s body, it would be hard to filter out what is caused by vaccine, and what is caused by pregnancy. Not a good basis for a scientific experiment.
I find it disgusting that she only mentions pregnant women, when everyone knows men are quite capable of falling pregnant and carrying a child to term. Such a transphobe.
Sarc aside, I am making a point of making similar comments on any news article that refers to similar topics, i.e. women / pregnancy / childbirth / menstruation etc. The sooner they realise the stupidity of the changes they embrace, the better.
The published safety summary makes it very clear that it’s not approved for a whole range of things including pregnancy and for anyone under 16 etc.
The under 16 restriction is going to make vaccine passports awkward as you are going to have to give them a free pass to allow families to travel or anything else you will need them for, sports games/concerts/etc
Correct, CLR. When you pile on companies, like the makers of thalidomide, there are negative consequences. Massive judgements against doctors in the U.S. results in massive insurance payments by doctors . . . paid for by the patients.
“Stick it to the bastards!”
“Uhhh . . . you know YOU will be paying for it?”
Maybe we could get a load of pregnant women and inject them with a HIV virus based vaccine, you know for testing.
What could possibly go wrong?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9040785/Queenslands-billion-dollar-coronavirus-vaccine-sensationally-SCRAPPED.html
I do like the argument that refusing to experiment on pregnant women is experimenting on pregnant women.
As Gamecock points out, actions have consequences. One of them being that normally drugs and vaccines are not designed for pregnant women. I do remember a niece of mine complaining that she just had to tough it out because she was pregnant. Everyone can imagine the mob coming for them with torches and pitchforks when something inevitably has a side effect.
The dangers of Covid are massively the male and the elderly. Pregnant women will be at very little risk even if they get it.
This underlines, though, that all those clamouring for vaccination passports need to accept that they have to go hand-in-hand with vaccine exemption certificates. It’s not as simple as they imagine.
Grikath, are we looking at the same study, or are you just listing common but far from universal exclusion criteria? This one is remarkably inclusive:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728
“The dangers of Covid are massively the male and the elderly. Pregnant women will be at very little risk even if they get it.”
It’s no fun, even if you don’t die from it.
But neither is any other winter flu. Then a week later, it’s all gone.
My body, my choice
If the organisers were besieged by pregnant women demanding to participate, there might be some cause to complain about exclusion.
If not, not.
“But neither is any other winter flu. Then a week later, it’s all gone.”
So one shouldn’t try to avoid winter flu.
Smallpox doesn’t kill anyone, either. Nor shingles. So no need to take the vaccines.
It’s no fun, even if you don’t die from it.
In young healthy women, most won’t even know they’ve got it.
Please don’t swallow the alarmist line that everyone gets it equally. The elderly, sick and male get it the same rate as everyone else, but they die of it more because the effects are much worse for them. That works in reverse too — young healthy women rarely die of it because they rarely major symptoms.
I actually don’t particularly try to avoid the winter flu. I work in a school, take no precautions and don’t get a vaccination. I presume I get it most years, but I’m healthy and it doesn’t affect me at all. It will be different when I am older and/or less healthy, but in the meantime I am not bothered enough to try to avoid the flu.
There’s talk of “long Covid”. My bet is that about a third have got something else (glandular fever, chronic fatigue) and that they caught Covid on top of what the real problem is. A third are psychosomatic — it is normal when any new disease comes along for people to do this (and we’ve seen a fair few celebrities suffer from phantom Covid already). A third are exaggerating because they are drama queens and love the attention — it’s not like some colds don’t hang around for ages.
So my bet is that “long Covid” is a bust, and that it won’t exist in a couple of years.