Thread by @VikiLovesFACS

A question I get asked *a lot* is…

“What are the long-term effects on babies born after #COVID19 #vaccination in #pregnancy?”

So let’s talk about what we know… 🧵

Let’s start by looking at the effects at birth. We now have eight large datasets from four countries looking at almost 79,000 people vaccinated in pregnancy. The outcomes for the babies are all normal. 2/

(The CDC has recently put out data from 2 more US studies, bringing the total to 10. But there is some overlap between the participants in these studies and the ones quoted above, so I didn't add those in as unique participants.)

From V-safe... 3/

https://twitter.com/VikiLovesFACS/status/1443104804323069956?s=20

And from the Vaccine Safety Datalink... 4/

https://twitter.com/VikiLovesFACS/status/1443104804323069956?s=20

If you would like to read more about this, there's a summary here. And if you want to read more, you can click the links to get to the primary papers... 5/

drive.google.com/file/d/1_wHIYX…

So all these babies look normal at birth. But is there a possibility that something will emerge in these healthy babies, months or years down the line? 6/

Obviously we don’t yet have data on what these babies will be like at, say, two years old, but we can use what we know about vaccination in pregnancy to make some predictions, with high confidence. 7/

Like the other vaccines routinely given in pregnancy, mRNA COVID19 vaccines do not cross the placenta. So they don’t actually get into the baby. This reduces the risk of an unexpected effect a lot. 8/

https://twitter.com/VikiLovesFACS/status/1397131519618162689?s=20

And from this, we might say that we expect the long term effects of these vaccines on babies to be similar to other vaccines we give in pregnancy… and we’ve never detected any bad ones.

More on this here... 9/

https://twitter.com/VikiLovesFACS/status/1417154283024404482?s=20

But finally, one thing I think is worth remembering if you’re pregnant right now is that there’s something going round at the moment which *can* have a long-term impact on the health of your baby.

COVID. 10/

We know that catching COVID in late pregnancy makes it more likely that you and your baby will suffer from a number of poor outcomes.

One of these is preterm birth. Babies who are born preterm are more likely to grow up with various disabilities. 11/

bmj.com/content/370/bm…

So just thinking about long-term outcomes for babies, we have every reason to expect the healthy babies born after vaccination in pregnancy will remain healthy.

On the other hand, COVID does pose long-term risks to babies and vaccination can prevent them. 12/12