President Trump’s second-term agenda has been careful not to cast doubt on his signature first-term achievement, the development of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed, which congressional Republicans continue to laud and even claim was sabotaged by Pfizer to deny Trump a consecutive term despite his base souring on the therapeutics.
A new preprint study on mRNA COVID vaccines in early pregnancy, coauthored by top advisers to Trump’s Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may fuel the splintering of the Make America Healthy Again movement as the jabs’ opponents ramp up pressure on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ban them.
Not yet peer-reviewed, the study analyzed hundreds of thousands of Israeli medical records on pregnant women in the three years before and after SARS-CoV-2 emerged in China, finding 43% more “observed-to-expected” fetal losses per 100 pregnancies — 13 instead of nine — when the first mRNA dose is taken between 8-13 weeks’ pregnancy.
Pregnant women who took a booster between 8-13 weeks lost an additional two pregnancies per 100, a “potential dose-response relationship,” the study said.
By using pregnant women who got flu vaccines between 8-27 weeks and women who received either vaccine before their pregnancy as “comparative controls,” the authors said they were able to show the association is unique to COVID vaccines.
The former had a “consistently lower-than-expected observed number of fetal losses, likely the result of healthy vaccinee bias” – in which people with overall better health tend to have higher vaccination rates – while the latter had “according-to-expected or lower-than-expected numbers of fetal losses,” the study found.