The one demographic that’s especially susceptible to COVID-19 hospitalizations but is ineligible for the vaccine? Infants under 6 months old.
Their mothers, however, could be the missing link: New research suggests that getting the COVID jab during pregnancy not only offers protection against the virus for pregnant women but also their babies.
A sweeping study out of Norway last week found that babies whose mothers were vaccinated during pregnancy faced a lower risk of contracting COVID in their first six months of life compared to babies whose mothers didn’t.
Dr. Thomas Nguyen, an Ohio-based pediatrician and associate professor at Ohio University’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine in Athens, recalled to NPR this week how patients started asking about vaccinations for pregnant women back in 2021.
By the time a vaccine became available to the public that year, data showed that pregnant women were more likely to be hospitalized and face severe complications from COVID, which led the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to recommend vaccinations for that group.
But back then, at the height of the pandemic, the decision was more of a gamble.
“This study basically confirms that we were correct in making those recommendations,” Nguyen said about these new findings. “It’s good to see our expectations were met with respect to COVID vaccines protecting young infants before they were old enough to get vaccinated themselves.”
First reported in the US in early 2020, the coronavirus has killed over 7.1 million people worldwide. The World Health Organization now estimates there are close to 43,000 new coronavirus cases reported monthly, with more variants still popping up.
When a pregnant woman receives the COVID vaccine, the antibodies get passed to her baby, protecting both from the virus.
The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, also found that receiving the vaccine in utero didn’t increase babies’ risk of infection for other diseases.
This finding in particular contradicts a common, but unsubstantiated, claim from vaccine critics who have long worried about the COVID vaccine’s supposed “suppression” of the immune system.
That claim has been traced to a 2023 paper published in Germany, which reported the novel behaviors of a specific antibody produced in large quantities after getting the vaccine. Anti-vax advocates have claimed that, in high numbers, this antibody makes people more vulnerable to other types of infections and even cancer.
But the findings of this recent paper out of Norway “refute the whole idea of that being a problem,” Nguyen told NPR, pointing out that the results would have shown a higher risk of other infections in the babies born to women who got the vaccine during pregnancy.
Instead, the researchers reported no increased risk of contracting COVID or any other infection and no increased risk of hospital visits.
This is especially poignant given the results of a 2024 study, which found that US infants under 6 months old are being hospitalized for COVID at the same rate as people aged 65 to 74. One in five of those babies was admitted to the ICU.
The new Pediatrics study showed that newborns 2 months and younger who had been exposed to the vaccine before birth were nearly half as likely to be hospitalized for COVID. And in babies 3 to 5 months old, COVID hospitalization was 24% less likely.
After babies reached 6 months, the vaccine protection wore off.
While the Pediatrics study isn’t the first to show the potential benefits of the COVID vaccine during pregnancy, it is one of the largest, compiling data from over 140,000 infants. The sheer volume of mothers and babies included in the research goes a long way in assuring doctors like Nguyen about the integrity of the findings, he said.
