Miss Dr.

Marianne Röbl-Mathieu, you are a gynecologist and a member of the Standing Vaccination Commission (STIKO), which this Friday spoke out in favor of Covid-19 vaccination for pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers.

How dangerous is Corona for pregnant women?

Sebastian Eder

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.

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In principle, the absolute risk of falling seriously ill with Covid-19 is also low for pregnant women.

But they are more seriously ill than women who are not pregnant.

Pregnant women have to be treated more often in hospital, treated in intensive care and invasively ventilated.

There is also a higher risk of pregnancy-related complications, such as premature birth.

This mostly comes about because the pregnancy is terminated early by doctors because either the mother is doing badly or the child is at risk.

What kind of data are these assessments based on?

A systematic umbrella review was carried out on the course of Covid-19 during pregnancy.

Systematic reviews summarize the results of all available studies on a topic and we were able to fall back on 14 such reviews that had already been published.

The most extensive of these reviews alone comprises 192 studies from more than 30 countries.

14 studies explicitly compared pregnant women with non-pregnant women.

It has been shown that pregnancy per se is a risk factor for severe Covid 19 disease.

More recent data have confirmed this.

The STIKO evaluates studies not only in terms of content, but also always according to their scientific quality.

How high is the risk for pregnant women of having to be treated in hospital for Covid 19 disease?

A severe course is observed in ten percent of all pregnant women who contract Covid-19.

About four percent of all pregnant women have to go to the intensive care unit.

The risk of having to be treated in the intensive care unit is two to five times higher than outside of pregnancy.

The risk of invasive ventilation is three percent, which is around two and a half times higher.

Covid-19 deaths during pregnancy, on the other hand, are rare occurrences.

We come to the vaccination: How big is the risk for pregnant women?    

It has to be said that there is still limited data on the safety of vaccination in pregnancy.

Essentially, we have three to four studies at our disposal, with two studies examining data on different endpoints from an American pregnancy registry.

And there is no evidence of an increased risk of miscarriages or premature births, malformations in the child or a low birth weight.

In the case of Covid-19, on the other hand, the risk of premature births, for example, is significantly increased - albeit not to a dramatic extent.

What about possible consequences for the unborn children?

What could be seen at birth was incorporated into these studies.

There was no indication of anomalies.

In the long term, however, you haven't been able to observe these children, can you?