Pregnant Woman Suffer Severe COVID-19 Outcomes, With 17% Hospitalized - Fauci

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st September, 2021) Pregnant women who contract COVID-19 face an elevated risk of life-threatening outcomes, with about 17 percent requiring hospitalization, while few if any women vaccinated during pregnancy suffered severe adverse reactions, according to data from the past 18 months cited by National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci on Thursday.

"If you look at [the] total number of cases of pregnant women with COVID -19 from January 2020 to August 2021, there have been about 110,000 cases, about 19,000 hospitalizations and 131 deaths," Fauci told reporters at a White House pandemic task-force briefing.

In contrast data from 35,000 pregnant vaccine recipients who participated in daily health-check ins with the cellphone-based V-safe system, "there were no obvious safety signals among pregnant women" who received the two-jab Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, Fauci said.

Slides accompanying Fauci's showed 109,773 pregnant women contracting COVID-19 from January 22, 2020 until August 23, 2021, of which 18,639 (17 percent) were hospitalized. By comparison data on a CDC website shows hospitalization rates for all people age 18-49 of about 6 percent.

Looking at immune responses for pregnant and lactating woman, vaccine benefits include potent antibody and T-cell responses that protect against a number of COVID-19 variants, while also protecting newborns through antibodies passed to the infants in breast milk, Fauci said.