Sept. 30, 2024 – Pregnant mothers plan and envision their child’s first months of life in detail, from buying adorable tiny socks to researching the best strollers. But health care officials are urging more mothers to consider a move that could help keep their babies from being hospitalized during early infancy: getting a COVID vaccine while pregnant.
Most babies who are hospitalized for COVID-19 have mothers who were not vaccinated, a new CDC report says. The worrying data shows that infants are the second-most hospitalized age group for COVID, after people ages 75 and older. Infants less than 6 months old had COVID hospitalization rates that were comparable to people ages 65 to 74 years old.
Babies must be at least 6 months old to get a COVID vaccine, but protection can be passed to babies from vaccinated mothers during pregnancy.
The new analysis included 1,470 babies less than 6 months old who had hospitalizations linked to COVID from October 2022 to April 2024. Nearly 90% of hospitalized babies had mothers with no documented COVID vaccination during pregnancy. Babies whose mothers were vaccinated during pregnancy tended to be older at hospitalization, typically nearly double the age. The average age of babies of unvaccinated mothers was 58 days, compared to 109 days of age for babies of mothers vaccinated during pregnancy.
The study showed that more than 1 in 5 babies hospitalized were admitted to the intensive care unit, and 1 in 20 babies needed help from a breathing machine called a ventilator. Just under 1% of the babies hospitalized for COVID died.
“Among infants whose mothers’ COVID-19 vaccination status was known, all who died in-hospital were born to mothers with no record of vaccination during pregnancy,” the report authors wrote, noting that only around 25% of pregnant people get COVID vaccines.
“These aren't necessarily high-risk, ill newborns,” Neil Silverman, MD, director of the Infectious Diseases in Pregnancy program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, told NPR. “These are full term, healthy newborn kids who happen to get COVID and wind up on a ventilator in the hospital.”
Numerous research studies have shown that COVID vaccination is safe during pregnancy as well as afterward for breastfeeding mothers. Vaccinated mothers can also pass protective antibodies to their babies through breast milk.
