Pregnant women warned by World Health Organisation not to take COVID-19 vaccine
PREGNANT women should not take Moderna's Covid vaccine, the World Health Organisation has warned.
In a statement issued on 26 January 2021, the Organisation said “The Moderna COVID-19 (mRNA-1273) vaccine: what you need to know… WHO does not recommend the vaccination of pregnant women.” The statement also added the WHO “do not know” whether the vaccine will even prevent people from catching or passing on the virus.
The UK has secured a deal for 17 million doses of the Moderna vaccine.
Pregnant and breastfeeding women were excluded from Moderna's vaccine clinical trials, so there is no safety data to prove it is safe for them.
The trials for the Pfizer and AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccines - which are being deployed in the UK - also did not involve mums-to-be.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises the government on the vaccine deployment strategy, said pregnant women should not receive either jab being rolled out in the UK.
UK Government guidelines issued to Healthcare Professionals state state there is no data on whether the vaccine has harmful side-effects on pregnant women or their unborn babies. Therefore the Government says the vaccine is not recommended for women during pregnancy. Women of childbearing age should not become pregnant before vaccination. In addition, women should be advised to avoid pregnancy for at least 2 months after the second dose of the vaccine. The Government guidelines state that women who are breast-feeding should not be vaccinated because there could be a risk to newborn babies and infants. The guidelines also state the Government do not know if the vaccine will cause infertility in women.
Vaccines produced using aborted baby cell lines
Vaccines for COVID-19 have been tested on, or contain cell lines that were derived from tissue of babies killed by abortion in the 1970s and 1980s.
Cell line HEK-293 is derived from kidney tissue taken from a baby girl who was aborted in the Netherlands in 1972.
Cell line PER.C6 is derived from eye tissue taken from a baby boy who was aborted in the Netherlands in 1985.
The vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna were tested using the HEK-293 cell lines. The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine contains the HEK-293 cell lines. The vaccine from Johnson & Johnson contains the PER.C6 cell lines.