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THEauren Lewis originally confused dry cough with allergies.
In early November 2020, she attended an outdoor concert with her mother and youngest daughter in Dallas, days after reluctantly attending a mandatory in-person meeting at work.
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“When I got home, I said to myself:”[The cough] is probably because I was around all the plants and was outside. It probably made my sinuses worse, ”said Lewis, 33, who lives in Dallas. “I didn’t think much about it, I just went to bed. But the next morning I woke up and felt like a train had hit me.
After learning that some colleagues were also feeling sick, Lewis decided to get tested for COVID-19 and his results came back positive. But her situation was more complex than most of the people who contracted the virus because she was three months pregnant at the time.
The nights were the worst, she said, the difficulty in breathing making it seem like “a weight was on your chest.” Even getting up to go to the bathroom was a chore that required her husband’s help, and at one point her daily diet consisted mostly of chicken broth and Pedialyte.
Although Lewis was never hospitalized with COVID-19 and recovered later, the experience remains with her, and when the coronavirus vaccine became available to high-risk Texans early in the year. year, Lewis jumped at the chance to get the vaccine. On April 23, she gave birth to a baby boy, Langston, without major complications.
However, not all pregnant women are as eager as Lewis to get the vaccine.
Pregnant women have one of the lowest vaccination rates in the United States: As of September 4, about 25% of pregnant women aged 18 to 49 had received at least one dose of the vaccine nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is significantly lower than the most recent national average for this age group, which is around 61%.
The Texas Department of State Health Services does not currently collect immunization data from pregnant women, agency spokesperson Lara Anton said, nor does it track cases, hospitalizations or deaths among this group. .
Doctors said there was no single reason for the low number of vaccinations, although hesitation and misinformation about vaccines played a role.
Recently, pregnant patients with COVID-19 have arrived in Texas hospitals at levels not seen earlier in the pandemic, some doctors say, illustrating the severity and contagiousness of the delta variant amid the most recent wave of State COVID-19.
“We’re just seeing a lot more of them progressing [to serious illness] very quickly, ”said Dr Manisha Gandhi, chief of maternal and fetal medicine at the Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Last August, more than 15 pregnant women were hospitalized with COVID-19 at the Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women. In August, the number nearly doubled, according to Texas Children’s.
“This variant is much more aggressive, [and] pregnant women get sick much faster, ”Gandhi said.
Fight disinformation
The CDC’s recent recommendation that pregnant women get vaccinated has given healthcare professionals hope others will. But they know it will always be a battle to overcome some of the hesitations that have set in since the start of the pandemic.
“Women want to make the best decision for themselves and their unborn child, and it’s a really difficult position when they don’t include pregnant or breastfeeding women in the process. [vaccine clinical] trial, ”said Dr. Teresa Baker, professor and regional chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in Amarillo.
Pregnant and breastfeeding women have long been excluded from initial clinical trials because of the possibility of endangering an unborn fetus, Baker said, so it’s no surprise that the same happened during vaccine development. COVID-19. But with the lack of initial information on how COVID-19 is affecting pregnant people and mixed advice from the CDC and major medical organizations, many pregnant people have felt left in the dark about how best to protect themselves. .
“We just worked with a lot of unknowns for a long time and it made it uncomfortable for everyone, but I think we’re slowly catching up,” said Baker.
A recent study in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology found that vaccines provide similar protection for pregnant and non-pregnant women.
Dr Jerald Goldstein, founder and medical director of the Fertility Specialists of Texas, said false claims circulating on social media that women would become infertile or sterile after being vaccinated contributed to some of the reluctance.
The misinformation online has “certainly created a lot of work for physicians in terms of talking to patients who really, really believe in it,” Goldstein said.
According to a recent study published in the journal of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, F&S Reports, “Neither previous illness with COVID-19 nor the antibodies produced by vaccination against COVID-19 will cause infertility.”
Studies have also shown that receiving the vaccine does not increase the risk of miscarriage or birth defects.
Gandhi, the Maternal-Fetal Specialist at Texas Children’s, said the most important part of her day now is making sure patients realize the benefits of vaccination and how much it reduces the risk of getting sick with COVID. -19 and having to be intubated or have a premature delivery.
She also urged pregnant women not to wait until after giving birth to get vaccinated.
“The most risky time is while they’re pregnant,” Gandhi said. ” … To get vaccinated [generate] antibodies that can cross the placenta and potentially protect the baby, so there is actually a bonus: you also increase the protection of your baby who may be exposed after delivery. “
To make a choice
Brittany Clay, an Austin resident, never really considered herself one of the first adopters in life. However, things changed once she found out she was pregnant in October 2020.
By that time, she had already lost a family member to the virus. In July, her uncle, who had colon cancer, died of complications from COVID-19. Then, in October, her grandfather also died of complications from the virus and her parents landed in hospital with pneumonia after contracting COVID-19.
“We said goodbye to my uncle on the phone, we said goodbye to my grandpa on the phone, and when I knew things were not going well for my parents, that’s when they stopped. to answer the phone, ”said Clay, 33. “They couldn’t talk on the phone anymore. It was too hard for them to breathe. And it was like, ‘Wow, we literally say goodbye to our loved ones, we tell them there is nothing wrong. to go on the phone – on loudspeaker It was the most horrible thing.
“It was such a scary time for our family, and when you go through circumstances like this, it’s just not that hard to make the decision to get the vaccine,” Clay said.
But the vaccine wasn’t available to those at high risk until December, and Clay always wanted to do his homework first. In January, about six months before the CDC recommended pregnant women get the coronavirus vaccine, Clay and her husband began collecting reports and studies on pregnant women and COVID-19.
Clay said she was also drawn to reading experiences shared on social media by doctors who were themselves pregnant and received the vaccine.
“Being pregnant during a pandemic has so many additional stressors and so many additional layers of fear and unpredictability, so much can be beyond your control,” Clay said. “So adding that additional unknown of this vaccine that, you know, has been around for nine months is a really scary decision, and I’m just trying to honor and respect the fact that it’s a decision people have to make on. own them. “
During her research, she also reconnected with Lewis, a former Texas Christian University classmate, via social media. Clay was curious to hear about Lewis’s experience with COVID-19 during pregnancy.
Since reconnecting, they’ve bonded about motherhood and the shared experience of getting vaccinated during pregnancy. Clay was fully immunized in February and gave birth to a baby girl named Navy on June 22.
“Later I returned to [Lauren] after I got Navy, and I was like, ‘You might have saved my life. Thank you very much for sharing your COVID experience with me, ”Clay said.
For both women, the importance of getting the vaccine was underscored by the news that one of their unvaccinated TCU classmates had died of complications from the virus after giving birth to her baby.
“It’s been so haunting and so sad,” Clay said. “She was so young and her family are now really trying to spread awareness about vaccines, and I recognize that the severity of cases is becoming more and more serious for pregnant women.”
Lewis has made it her personal mission to encourage pregnant women to get vaccinated and has posted videos of herself getting vaccinated on social media.
“If you have any questions, please contact me,” Lewis said on video in February after receiving his second dose. “I am very pregnant, so I have a different perspective because I had COVID.”
Lewis said she hopes other pregnant women will follow her advice.
“I want to say, [COVID-19] really sucked my life out, ”Lewis said. “… Honestly, I’m waiting to go get my third shot. I want to get it because I never want to feel what I felt with COVID, and I don’t want anyone to ever feel that way when they don’t have to. “
Allyson Waller is a journalist at the Texas Tribune, the only non-partisan, member-backed media organization that educates Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Disclosure: Texas Christian University has financially supported The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations, and corporate sponsors. Financial support plays no role in the journalism of the Tribune. Find a suit list of them here.
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