COVID vaccines and safety around pregnancy
The Motivation
As a favor to Amy, I put together my best investigation of the question: Are there any legitimate safety concerns around the COVID vaccine, especially for women who are either pregnant or hoping to become pregnant (sorry, no news yet but... pray for us!). I thought the investigation might be of interest to other people in my circle
Everything around COVID has gotten so political that it's become hard to find non-partisan information. There's a big contingent in my own circle (Orthodox Catholic, red-tribe leaning) which is very concerned about the safety, effectiveness, and ethics of the vaccine. Do they have a point? It's awfully hard to tell, and its not made any easier by how the blue tribe seems to prefer ham-fisted propaganda and assertions of "Trust Science!" rather than making actual arguments based on numbers.
So, this is my best, honest attempt to weight the arguments for and against the safety of the vaccine across the internet. Note, I'm limiting the scope of this to the safety of the vaccine, with an emphasis on the safety for soon-to-be mothers and their developing babies. I know there are another set of worries about the effectiveness of the vaccine on the internet, and I'm not addressing those, at least not in this article
The Evidence For
It seems that the main source of hesitancy about getting the vaccine while pregnant came from the initial months the vaccine was available. The CDC held off recommending it for pregnant women because there was no data yet on how it affected pregnancy. Pregnant women were excluded from the initial trials, because it wouldn’t be ethical to give the most vulnerable people an as-yet unproven medication.
However, lots of pregnant women did choose to get the vaccine as soon as it became available! And the data from following them looks pretty positive.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2784193
This one just scanned medical records systems, and was able to track 105 446 women in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy. The key finding, best I read it, is that of the women who miscarried, 8.6% had received the vaccine during the period they watched compared to 8.0% of those who didn’t miscarry. At first, this looks like a small but significant risk of miscarriage. However, the population which received the vaccine was older on average, and once they adjusted for that, the risk disappeared.
Zuache et al: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2113891
Shimabukuro et al: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2104983
The next two draw on data from the CDC’s v-safe program. It appears to be a program where, after receiving the vaccine, you could volunteer to track your health by filling out a daily health questionnaire via an app , and the CDC has monitored this to look for side effects that didn’t show up in the initial trials. V-safe has included several thousand pregnant volunteers, a high percentage of whom were healthcare workers.
The Zauche study was was particularly looking for information regarding miscarriages between week 6 and week 20, and found a 14.1% miscarriage rate, across the 2456 women in the study. This came down to a 12.8% rate after adjusting for maternal age. They say that’s very much in line with what you’d consider the normal miscarriage rate (11% to 22% of pregnancies, depending on exactly how you count it).
The Shimabukuro study looks at 3958 women across all stages of pregnancy. They only found an 8.5% miscarriage rate, but it looks like they included a lot of women who weren’t in the study all the way from the beginning to week 20. Probably a better indicator is the ratio of live births to miscarriages: 13.9%, very much in line with Zauche. They also looked for other adverse outcomes, such as preterm birth, low birth weight, any abnormalities, and concluded “Preliminary findings did not show obvious safety signals among pregnant persons who received mRNA Covid-19 vaccines”
University of Minnesota article that summarizes several of these studies:
Now, you’ll notice that most of these don’t have proper control groups. Best I can tell, this is par for the course. Once a treatment is shown to be as effective as the COVID vaccine, it’s considered unethical to give some patients a placebo.
It seems like largely based on these studies, the CDC began recommending the vaccine for pregnant women as well.
The Concerns
I scanned the internet to see if I could get an answer to “What are the concerns about the vaccine on the orthodox Catholic side”?
It’s kind of a confusing hodgepodge. I was surprised to discover that there’s not much in the way of formal “studies” that people are concerned about - more, it’s a bunch of Facebook posts, reshares, memes, tweets, interviews, live-streamed talks, and anecdotes. There’s also not one health concern they focus on - it seems to be more a scattering of “Maybe the vaccine causes X” with all sorts of different values for X. My best bet for trying to get a sense of them is this page from LifeSiteNews:
https://lifefacts.lifesitenews.com/covid-19/covid-19-vaccine/
It’s their own curated list of articles on why they don’t like the vaccine, and I supplemented it with my own google searching.
The one which involves a study, which I see come up the most, is:
https://www.pro-memoria.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/Aborto-vaccini-Covid_-Researchers-bury-data-showing-82-miscarriage-rate-in-vaccinated-women-LifeSiteNews.pdf
It’s based off of the Shimabukuro study I put in the “pro” column. Analysis here: http://darwincatholic.blogspot.com/2021/07/no-covid-vaccines-are-not-causing-first.html In short, it appears that somebody took a study which indicated the vaccine was safe during pregnancy… and then copy-pasted various numbers from from it to tell an entirely made-up story about the vaccine causing miscarriages, then linked to the study to give it a scientific veneer, and hoped people would like and share without reading further than a quick Ctrl-F to confirm that those numbers came from the study. It’s a case of outright deception.
To be fair, LifeSiteNews took down the original article, but it seems to remain the source of much of the concern about miscarriages
There are some claims like “Miscarriage rate quadruples in England after vaccine approved” (seen in a Facebook comment, can’t find an article for that one) or “Vaccine causes 5 times as many deaths as COVID” https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/covid-jabs-came-from-bioterrorism/?utm_source=lifefacts
Which are easily falsifiable from public data.
There’s also a lot of FUD and speculation - things like, “It's new and experimental”, “We don’t have years-long studies proving that there are no negative effects years later”. “The spike proteins produced by the vaccine are small enough that they might be able to cross the blood-brain barrier and then get into your brain and cause Alzheimers!”.
Certainly we don't have years-long studies proving that there are no booby-trap side-effects that only manifest years later, but that's true of virtually every food and medicine. I've never seen this put in so many words, but the impression I get from reading a bunch of medical folks discussing the issue is that, side effects that only manifest years later just aren't something they worry too much about. Your body has trouble getting rid of heavy metals, but aside from that, foreign substances don't stick around.
Within a few days, either you metabolise them (break them down), or pee them out, or your immune system attacks them. If they're going to injure you, the injury happens right away. Even for carcinogens, the problem is accumulated cell damage from repeated, heavy exposure.
There’s one article expressing some general anxieties about how it might affect fertility: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/stop-the-shot-conference-doctors-pregnant-women-should-never-take-the-vaccine/?utm_source=lifefacts
It seems the biggest claim of the article is:
nanoparticles, used in mRNA jab technology, “can disrupt the levels of secreted hormones, causing changes in sexual behavior,” since the nanoparticles “can pass through the blood-testis barrier, placental barrier, and epithelial barrier, which protect reproductive tissues.” …… The report “shows very clearly that the lipid nanoparticles accumulate at least twenty-fold [in the ovaries] compared with other tissues,” Yeadon said.
But I also found this discussion here, with a link to the original study: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57552527
It really doesn’t look too alarming. Basically, they gave rats a dose of the vaccine 1000x higher than what they give to people, watched how it processed through their bodies, and looked for adverse side effects. They noted that traces of the fatty shell around the RNA could be detected in the Rat’s ovaries and adrenal glands 48 hours later, but didn’t seem to carry any of the genetic material. Best I can tell, they didn’t find any toxicity.
Some concerns about an increase in cardiac events following the vaccine… but it looks like LifeSiteNews cherry-picks https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/covid-shots-linked-to-2-million-injuries-21766-deaths-in-europe-eu-reports/ numbers to try to paint the most alarming story, and the more responsible reactions are “There’s a tiny risk, but it’s much smaller than the risk of similar cardiac events as complications of COVID”
There are also some genuine concerns about allergic reactions. In this study https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7002e1.htm?s_cid=mm7002e1_w , the CDC noted that out of a sample of 1,893,360 people receiving the vaccine, 104 people reported allergic reactions, 21 of which were anaphylactic. Most of the anaphylactic reactions took place within 15 minutes of receiving the vaccine, so they started recommending that you wait around for 15 minutes of monitoring after receiving the shot. Having allergies to other things seemed to be a risk factor for having a reaction to the vaccine, but still not enough to make it very likely
There is also legitimate evidence of some women having a heavier-than-normal period after receiving the vaccine, but it seems like this is a known side-effect of several vaccines, and hasn’t seemed to cause any long-term harm https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56901353
For me, one thing I was concerned enough to look into, was, there’s evidence that fighting an infection in pregnancy raises the risk of the baby developing autism, so there might be a tiny risk from receiving the vaccine during first trimester. But on further investigation that seems very unlikely - the infection-autism link has only come up either for severe bacterial infections (sepsis, pneumonia) or, interestingly, urinary tract infections
Ethics
Now, all of the LifeSiteNews arguments strike me as motivated reasoning. Like, the thought process isn’t “We encountered some anomalous evidence which makes us concerned about the vaccine”; rather its “We’ve decided beforehand that we don’t like the vaccine, and we’re digging for evidence to back that up (and we’re so eager to find it that we're prone to making things up where we can’t find evidence)”
It seems like some of it comes from a sincere ethical concern about tissue from aborted babies used in medical research.
Best I can tell, the story goes something like this:
A common tool for microbiology research is immortal cell lines. These are derived from isolating a cancerous cell from a person, and letting it divide and divide ad infinitum. You can share bits of tissue from a cell line, and run experiments all around the world using identical cells. There are several cell lines which have been dividing, virtually unchanged for over 40 years. They are extraordinarily well characterized from years of research, and allow apples-to-apples comparisons across new research.
And many of the most widely used ones were first derived under ethically doubtful circumstances. There are two common ones which were derived from aborted (or don’t know for certain but probably aborted) babies, and others taken from poor minority patients without their consent.
The Johnson&Johnson vaccine and the AstraZeneca vaccine are produced with the help of cells from one of these lines from an aborted baby
To my understanding, it’s not that the research and production couldn’t be done with non-fetal cell lines, but that they’re a little more convenient.
Now, the Pfizer/Moderna mRNA vaccines are NOT produced using tissue from abortion-derived cell lines. In the course of developing them, researchers did some testing against mice who had been given human-like immune systems by injecting them with cells from one of these fetal lines. But such tests have (unfortunately) been performed for any drug you can name, from Ivermectin to Tylenol. We should certainly advocate for performing these tests without using abortion-derived cells, but it becomes absurd to reject any substance for which such testing has ever been performed. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/throughcatholiclenses/2021/01/if-any-drug-tested-on-hek-293-is-immoral-goodbye-modern-medicine/
Some Bishops advocate that its preferable to use the mRNA vaccines where they're available, but generally agree that in either case, the cooperation with the one abortion from decades ago is remote enough, and the need severe enough, to make receiving the vaccine commendable.
https://mocatholic.org/sites/missouricc/files/messenger_1_21_for_web_pages.pdf
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