Nature Medicine publishes Scottish study in which unvaccinated pregnant women had worse outcomes when they got COVID than vaccinated women. The authors did not study the 95% of pregnant women without COVID to see what their outcomes were, although they had access to these data.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01666-2

The issue is not whether there is some vaccine efficacy for the first two shots, especially with the early variants—there is some efficacy.  The vaccines provided good protection briefly, which lasted longer the younger you were, which began falling within weeks of vaccination.

Unvaccinated pregnant women in this study from Scotland had more severe COVID disease than the vaccinated women. But how many received treatment with appropriate medications? We aren't told.  

Pregnant women are naturally immune suppressed, which is what allows them to carry their children (foreign bodies) to term. They are at risk of severe infection by virtue of being pregnant.

This study found that 5.4% of pregnancies had a confirmed case of COVID.  95% did not.  How did the outcomes of this much larger group of pregnant women compare:  did the vaccinated or the unvaccinated have better pregnancy outcomes?  We are not told, although this study was sponsored by the UK government, which has all the data needed to make the comparison.

Did the authors have any conflicts of interest? They certainly did.

Competing interests

A.S. and C.R. are members of the Scottish Government’s COVID-19 Advisory Group. A.S. and C.R. are members of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group risk stratification subgroup. C.R. is a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modeling. A.S. is a member of AstraZeneca’s Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Advisory Group. All roles are unremunerated. R.W. and C.R. are employed by Public Health Scotland. S.J.S. has received research grants paid to the institution from Wellcome Trust, Scottish Chief Scientist Office, National Institute of Healthcare Research and Tommy’s during the course of this study. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

22.6% of pregnant COVID cases were vaccinated. 32% of all pregnant women giving birth in October in Scotland had had 2 vaccine doses.

This study ended in October, before the Omicron variant was identified.  Vaccination today provides much less protection against Omicron that it did for earlier variants. Thus these data are not relevant to a decision on vaccinating pregnant women today.

The foundational issue is whether the benefits of COVID vaccination outweigh the risks in pregnancy.  What is the risk of miscarriage after vaccination?  Birth defects? Side effects in the mother?

Only if the benefits clearly outweigh the risk should any drug or vaccine be used in pregnancy.  Very few drugs and vaccines fit this bill.  Luckily, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) does. From the HCQ label:

Pregnancy 

Teratogenic Effects: Human pregnancies resulting in live births have been reported in the literature and no increase in the rate of birth defects has been demonstrated. Embryonic deaths and malformations of anophthalmia and microphthalmia in the offspring have been reported when pregnant rats received large doses of chloroquine. 

Since the data on COVID vaccine-related stillbirths have been suppressed (Dr. Mel Brouchet, who blew the whistle on this in Canada was locked up in a psych hospital for a month and injected with antipsychotics) and my testimony on Tuesday January 11 to the Maine HHS committee pointed out that the FDA required Pfizer-BioNTech to study its vaccine in pregnancy but will not receive the final report until 2025, it is clear that the risk-benefit of COVID has not yet been carefully determined.

Thus there is no justification for vaccinating pregnant women until both the risk and the benefit can be examined and we are satisfied that the benefit outweighs the risk.

BTW, what happened to Dr. Bruchet makes me wonder why the board demanded I undergo a psychological exam.

And here are some thoughts from Mark Crispin Miller:

While such forcible faux-medical detention of the non-compliant has been rare in the United States, psychiatric diagnosis—or something that sounds kinda like it—has been deployed time after time, deliberately or out of ignorance, to cast dissidents, or whistleblowers, or any other inconvenient witnesses as cracked. This tactic, or error, is known as the “Martha Mitchell effect”—”the process,” notes Wikipedia, “by which a psychiatrist, psychologist, mental health clinician, or other medical professional labels a patient’s accurate perception of real events as delusional, resulting in misdiagnosis.”