UK not giving covid vaccines to pregnant women 2025 - 2026

The Childrens Health Defense reported: UK’s vaccine advisory committee won’t recommend pregnant women take the COVID-19 vaccine in 2025-2026. Researchers presented evidence COVID-19 poses very low risk to pregnant women and their infants and the vaccines provide minimal benefit.

• The committee’s new recommendation — which must be ratified at the next meeting — followed presentations by researchers on COVID-19 epidemiology and cost-effectiveness.

• The researchers presented evidence showing that COVID-19 posed a very low risk to pregnant women and their infants and that the vaccines provided minimal benefit.

• They concluded that COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant women becomes cost-effective only if the cost of procuring and administering the vaccines could be kept between 10.07 and 13.19 pounds ($12.74-$16.69) per shot. They considered it “very unlikely” that this would be feasible.

• The only way to increase the price at which vaccines were considered cost-effective would be if they could show the vaccine averted neonatal deaths from COVID-19 or posed a greater threat to infants. There is no existing data to support this, they said.

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• The UK Health Security Agency presented epidemiological data to the committee, showing there were no COVID-19-related ICU (intensive care unit) admissions or deaths among pregnant women in any trimester or their infants in the U.K. between October 2022 and December 2023.

• In their evaluation of the “number needed to vaccinate,” a commonly used measure of vaccine effectiveness, the researchers estimated that 300,000 pregnant women would need to be vaccinated to prevent one serious hospitalization for COVID-19 during pregnancy, as such cases are rare. Similar results were observed for infants’ hospitalization.

• The researchers estimated that just over 13,000 pregnant women would need to be vaccinated to prevent one serious hospital admission for an infant under age 3 months. To prevent one infant death, between 380,000 and 1.5 million pregnant women would need to be vaccinated.

• They said the latter number was difficult to calculate with certainty, given the difficulty in attributing any infant deaths at all to COVID-19. They also said it was difficult to attribute any infant hospitalizations to COVID-19 — and that current data likely overestimated COVID-19 hospitalization among infants — because hospitalized infants typically had other coexisting infections.

• Researchers from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, and the Department of Health and Social Care presented modeled data on cost-effectiveness.

• The U.K. will continue to use a “bespoke, non-standard cost-effectiveness assessment” through the spring 2025 COVID-19 vaccination campaign because they still have stockpiled vaccines available.

• However, from fall 2025 on health officials will use JCVI’s standard cost-effectiveness model, which factors in costs for vaccine procurement, along with outcomes such as maternal or infant hospitalizations, ICU admissions and preterm birth or infant death.

• Within that framework, the vaccines are not cost-effective for pregnant women and their babies, the committee concluded.

• The committee agreed that starting in fall 2025 and spring 2026, only adults 75 and older, care home residents and immunosuppressed people over 6 months will be eligible for the vaccine.

• They noted that COVID-19 showed no seasonality and estimated that overall the vaccine was 50% effective against hospitalization in the first four weeks following vaccination, with protection waning to zero by 28 weeks.

Article in full: UK Regulators Decide Pregnant Women Don’t Need COVID Vaccines