Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A higher-than-expected number of miscarriages and other forms of fetal loss were associated with COVID-19 vaccinations in Israel, a new study has revealed.
Researchers found 13 fetal losses—four more than the nine expected—for every 100 pregnant women who received a COVID-19 vaccine during weeks eight to 13 in pregnancy, according to the study, which was published as a preprint on the medRxiv server.
Most people in Israel, including pregnant women, received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
Pfizer did not respond by publication time to a request for comment.
The team behind the study includes Retsef Levi, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher who was recently named to the committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines, and Dr. Tracy Hoeg, who works for the Food and Drug Administration.
The researchers analyzed electronic health records from Maccabi Healthcare Services, one of four organizations that provide health care to Israelis. They looked at 226,395 pregnancies that occurred between March 1, 2016, and Feb. 28, 2022. The primary analysis looked at fetal loss for pregnant women after dose one or dose three of a COVID-19 vaccine, with fetal loss including miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth.
The researchers came up with an expected number of fetal losses based on a model that drew from data before the COVID-19 pandemic, then compared the expected number of fetal losses with those that occurred from week eight of pregnancy onward.
They identified 13,214 fetal losses after the COVID-19 pandemic started, compared with 12,846 fetal losses in the reference period, finding that women who received a COVID-19 vaccine during weeks eight to 13 in pregnancy experienced a higher-than-expected number of fetal losses.
“If you believe this result ... every 100 women that you would vaccinate during weeks eight to 13, you are going to see close to four additional fetal losses,” Levi told The Epoch Times.
The researchers cautioned that more information is required to say for sure that the vaccines cause fetal losses.
They also noted that when they carried out the same analysis for pregnant women who received a COVID-19 vaccine during weeks 14 to 27, the number of fetal losses was lower than expected.
An additional analysis of pregnant women who received an influenza vaccine from March 1, 2018, to Feb. 28, 2019, also found a lower-than-expected number of fetal losses.
The researchers said those results could stem from what is known as healthy vaccine bias—the data could be skewed because people who receive vaccines are typically healthier than those who do not.
Maccabi Healthcare Services did not return an inquiry by publication time. Dr. Yaakov Segal, head of obstetrics and gynecology medicine at the organization, is one of the paper’s co-authors.
Israel’s Ministry of Health and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which encourages pregnant women to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in any trimester, did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.
“Generally, medical advice to pregnant women follows the precautionary principle and is based on sound and careful research,” Josh Guetzkow, researcher with Hebrew University of Jerusalem and another study co-author, told The Epoch Times via email. “Our study shows just how irresponsible it was for our health authorities to abandon these core principles.”
COVID-19 vaccination was recommended for pregnant women in Israel and the United States early in the COVID-19 pandemic, even though the clinical trials for the vaccines excluded pregnant women.
Moderna’s clinical trial for pregnant women was ultimately terminated, while Pfizer ended its trial early after enrolling just 175 women. The latter found slightly lower COVID-19 incidence among the vaccinated when compared with those who received a placebo.
Some observational studies have determined that pregnant women benefit from COVID-19 vaccination.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently narrowed its COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and no longer advises COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy.
The new paper was published as a preprint, without peer review. Levi said the paper had been rejected by two journals, and the authors decided that the implications were too important to continue to not release it to the public.
Guetzkow said the researchers are going to keep trying to get the paper published by a journal.