Findings based on large study of 15,000 Israeli women<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n
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WEDNESDAY, July 21, 2021 (HealthDay News) — The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is associated with a significantly lower risk for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in pregnant women, according to a study published online July 12 in the Journal of the American Medical Association<\/em>.<\/p>\n Inbal Goldshtein, Ph.D., from Maccabi Healthcare Services in Tel Aviv, Israel, and colleagues used data from a pregnancy registry (including 7,530 vaccinated and 7,530 matched unvaccinated women) to assess the association between receipt of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine and the risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection among pregnant women.<\/p>\n The researchers noted 118 SARS-CoV-2 infections in the vaccinated group and 202 in the unvaccinated group. In the vaccinated group, 83.8 percent were symptomatic versus 83.2 percent in the unvaccinated group (P \u00e2\u0089\u00a5 0.99). However, in the 28 to 70 days of follow-up, there were 10 infections in the vaccinated group and 46 in the unvaccinated group, yielding hazards of infection of 0.33 and 1.64 percent, respectively (absolute difference: 1.31 percent; adjusted hazard ratio, 0.22). Sixty-eight patients reported vaccine-related adverse events, including headache (0.1 percent), general weakness (0.1 percent), nonspecified pain (<0.1 percent), and stomachache (<0.1 percent); no severe reactions were reported.<\/p>\n “In this retrospective cohort study of pregnant women, BNT162b2 mRNA vaccination compared with no vaccination was associated with a significantly lower risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the authors write. “Interpretation of study findings is limited by the observational design.”<\/p>\n