Pregnancy is a risk factor for Covid. Pregnant women are not more likely to be infected, but if they are, they are more likely to develop a severe form and/or give birth prematurely.
Hence the importance of vaccinating them: medical professions and health authorities were reluctant in Europe for a time, due to a lack of data available in clinical trials, but pharmacovigilance monitoring has shown that RNA vaccines were safe and effective during a pregnancy, and all the more useful since we cannot vaccinate toddlers.
However, there remained a gray area: when the mother is infected, what about the risk of transmission to her born or unborn child? It is not zero, but is very limited, respond in the British Medical Journal researchers from the World Health Organization and the University of Birmingham (UK). Previous work had revealed the existence of virus fragments “in maternal blood, placenta, amniotic fluid and breast milk”, specify the authors.
Taking up more than 470 scientific publications concerning nearly 29,000 mothers infected with Sars-CoV-2, this work shows that transmission in utero, during delivery or immediately after, is possible but remains unlikely. “The overall positivity rate for Sars-CoV-2 in babies born to infected mothers is low” (less than 2%), and even more so if we limit ourselves to exposure to the virus during childbirth and immediately after ( less than 1%).