Only 32% of pregnant Americans are vaccinated, with fracture getting worse by racial criteria

Dr Joia Crear-Perry, Founder, National Birth Equity Collaborative:

Well, it took us a long time to really get close to pregnant women.

If you think back to the start of this pandemic, we focused on the elderly, on the frontline workers, and so our message and our outreach really focused on those areas.

And for so long, this stuff has left pregnant women, as well as pregnant people, as well as children, out of the conversation. So it’s confusing I’m sure if you’re pregnant right now to say it’s been 18 months. Why are you telling me now that I need to be vaccinated?

So we have to do a really good job explaining that, even though at the beginning we didn’t have data showing that pregnant women should be vaccinated because they weren’t the most at risk, we got vaccinated. these frontline workers, we vaccinated the elderly, and now the virus has moved on to the next host, right?

And the next unvaccinated host will be pregnant women and children, because we didn’t include them at the start. So science is telling us that it is time that we really step up our efforts to reach this group.