Was it right to recommend vaccines for pregnant women when the consequences for the pregnant woman and the child were still unknown? This question was asked during the COVID-19 pandemic when vaccines were rolled out in the Nordic countries. Many things were uncertain, and much was untested.
"When the vaccine arrived, it had not yet been fully tested on pregnant women, so it felt incredibly important to research this. It has been the best and most important research collaboration I have been involved in throughout my career as a researcher. We put most other things on hold and focused all our efforts on this study. Because we had data from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, we were even able to conduct the studies in real time. We hoped we would not discover any negative consequences of the vaccine, but we did not know that at the time. We were also very concerned that we would end up in a negative media storm," says Olof Stephansson.
He is a doctor and professor of clinical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and researches risks to mothers and children during and after childbirth. He also heads the SCOPE 2: Studies of COvid-19 in PrEgnancy - A framework to secure reproductive, maternal and child health during societal crises.
Large amounts of health data
The project is part of NordForsk's initiative Societal Security beyond COVID-19, in which six research projects have received funding to investigate the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for societal security in the Nordic countries.
The researchers had access to health data and compared 28,000 vaccinated pregnant women with 29,000 unvaccinated pregnant women to see how pregnant women and unborn children were affected by the vaccine. Another study looked at how vaccines for pregnant women might affect newborn children. The study included data from 94,000 pregnant women who were vaccinated and 122,000 who were not.
Based on all the data, the researchers in the SCOPE 2 project have demonstrated that there are no negative consequences associated with pregnant women receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. Neither for themselves nor for their babies. In fact, it has been shown that the unborn child benefits from the pregnant woman being vaccinated, and the same applies in the period after birth. Newborn babies receive antibodies from their mother's vaccine.
"It has been fantastic to be able to contribute such important results, which have been able to reassure people that it was safe for pregnant women to be vaccinated. During the pandemic, we in the project were in close contact with the authorities in our respective countries and were able to communicate our results to them on an ongoing basis. During the pandemic, for example, I had regular meetings with the Swedish Public Health Agency to provide them with up-to-date information from our research project.”
Nordic health data creates security
According to Olof Stephansson, one advantage of the study is that it looked at the entire population of Norway, Sweden and Denmark and therefore has a large data base.
"This means that the results are very convincing. At the same time, we have conducted the studies from a public health perspective, which creates greater confidence than if they had been conducted by vaccine manufacturing companies. This has made the results of our research more widely accepted, but there are always sceptics and people who do not believe in the effectiveness of vaccines."
Did you know?
SCOPE 2 stems from a previous research project under NordForsk, which studied pregnant women and COVID infection.
Read more about it: SCOPE - Scandinavian studies of COVID-19 in Pregnancy.
