Salon:

Why pregnant people were left behind while vaccines moved at “warp speed” to help the masses

One way to leave pregnant women behind is to refuse to mention them, the way Salon did in the headline.

Clinical trials of COVID vaccines excluded pregnant people, which left many wondering whether to get vaccinated

And in the subhead.

A year ago, there was little to no vaccine safety data for pregnant people like Slade, because they had been excluded from clinical trials run by Pfizer, Moderna, and other vaccine makers.

The Slade in question is of course a woman. Salon knows she’s a woman.

Lacking data, health experts were unsure and divided about how to advise expectant parents. Although U.S. health officials permitted pregnant people to be vaccinated, the World Health Organization in January 2021 actually discouraged them from doing so; it later reversed that recommendation.

The uncertainty led many women to delay vaccination, and only about two-thirds of the pregnant people who have been tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were fully vaccinated as of Feb. 5, leaving many expectant moms at a high risk of infection and life-threatening complications.

Hedging their bets. Sometimes they admit it’s women, other times they pretend it’s people.

More than 29,000 pregnant people have been hospitalized with covid and 274 have died, according to the CDC.

“There were surely women who were hospitalized because there wasn’t information available to them,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Vaccine developers say that pregnant people — who have special health needs and risks — were excluded from clinical trials to protect them from potential side effects of novel technologies, including the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines and formulations made with cold viruses, such as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

But a KHN analysis also shows that pregnant people were left behind because including them in vaccine studies would have complicated and potentially delayed the delivery of covid vaccines to the broader population.

The incoherence persists.

A growing number of women’s health researchers and advocates say that excluding pregnant people — and the months-long delay in recommending that they be immunized — helped fuel widespread vaccine hesitancy in this vulnerable group.

“Women and their unborn fetuses are dying of covid infection,” said Dr. Jane Van Dis, an OB-GYN at the University of Rochester Medical Center who has treated many patients like Slade. “Our failure as a society to vaccinate women in pregnancy will be remembered by the children and families who lost their mothers to this disease.”

It goes on and on the same way – it’s a long piece – saying mostly “people” with an occasional “women” thrown in to confuse us. The campaign to erase women from reporting and eventually the language continues.