By Samantha Putterman - Politifact
Preliminary findings from an article that assessed how pregnant women were doing months after receiving a messenger RNA vaccine against COVID-19 are being misrepresented online.
Some alarming posts, like one shared on Instagram on July 6, claim that 82% of women who got vaccinated early in their pregnancy experienced a miscarriage.
This is false
.
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"Miscarriage rate of 82% among women who received the liquid between 30 days and 20 weeks of pregnancy," reads the title of the false publication.
The post on Instagram was flagged as part of Facebook's efforts to combat fake news and misinformation on its wall.
(Read more about Politifact's association with Facebook.)
The result offered by the publication is biased
because it does not take into account all the pregnancies that were evaluated in the study, only those that are considered complete at the time it was published.
Most of the participants are still pregnant or have not yet had a follow-up with the authors of the article to find out what happened to their pregnancies.
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While the results did not find an increased risk of miscarriage associated with the COVID-19 vaccine, there is still a lack of information.
The researchers acknowledge that the data available on the subject remains limited and requires further investigation.
What does the study say?
The study, titled "Preliminary Findings on the Safety of the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine in Pregnant People," was published by the New England Journal of Medicine on June 17.
It was done by a team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The authors used data from pregnant women who received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines and recorded their information in three federal systems that monitor vaccine safety.
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The researchers contacted 3,958 women who had signed up for a pregnancy registry during the coronavirus pandemic, approximately three months after their vaccination.
They found that 712 had given birth to healthy babies, 104 suffered miscarriages and one case resulted in stillbirth.
10 cases of induced abortion and ectopic pregnancy were also resisted.
The rest of the participants, more than 3,100, were either still pregnant or had not had a follow-up call with the researchers.
A pregnant woman received the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 in Mexico City on May 13, 2021. World health authorities consider these vaccines safe for pregnant women.
Fernando Llano / AP
The results showed a miscarriage rate of 12.6% among the 827 pregnancies evaluated, which is comparable to the average miscarriage rate of 10 to 20%.
(Some experts believe this figure may be higher.)
The miscarriage rate of 12.6% only reflects complete pregnancies known to the authors at the time of publication of the article.
The authors of the fake Instagram post say the problem is that 700 of those 827 women received the vaccine when they were already in their third trimester of pregnancy, a point at which fetuses are much more developed and miscarriage is less common. .
So, they changed the denominator by excluding those 700 cases to calculate a new miscarriage rate of about 82%.
Other social media posts have put it as high as 84%.
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Victoria Male, a professor of reproductive immunology at Imperial College London, said that talking about 84% is "nonsense."
"The aforementioned 84% rate is not the miscarriage rate," Male said in a series of tweets.
"It just tells us that we can't go from the first trimester to having a healthy baby in three months. I think we all knew that, right?" She wrote.
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The miscarriage rate of 12.6% only reflects completed pregnancies known to the authors at the time of publication of the article.
The problem, proponents of the false claim say, is that 700 of those 827 pregnant women received the vaccine when they were already in their third trimester, a point in pregnancy when fetuses are much more developed and miscarriage is less common. .
So, they changed the denominator by excluding those 700 to calculate a new miscarriage rate of about 82%.
Other social media posts have put it as high as 84%.
Victoria Male, professor of reproductive immunology at Imperial College London, called 84% "nonsense."
"The cited 84% rate is not the miscarriage rate," Male said in a series of tweets.
"It just tells us that we can't go from the first trimester to having a healthy baby in three months. I think we all knew that, right?"
More research is needed
The CDC's Office of Immunization Safety told PolitiFact that the document was an initial analysis of pregnancy registry data during the COVID-19 pandemic, and said the department has discussed how best to present the number. of abortions described as "spontaneous".
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"We felt that it was important to report all the miscarriages that had been observed in the registry so far. At the same time, we wanted to limit the analysis to pregnancies for which we had final outcome data, as there may be complete pregnancies for which We don't know yet why (the pregnant women) haven't had a scheduled follow-up call, ”the CDC said.
In future reports, the CDC plans to limit its study to women who were vaccinated less than 20 weeks pregnant and after their estimated due dates have passed.
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By analyzing limited data from women who received a vaccine before 20 weeks of pregnancy, the CDC found 27 miscarriages among 1,364 women, a rate of about 2%.
But this is probably an understatement because scientists don't yet know if all the remaining pregnancies were still ongoing.
Our verdict
An Instagram post claims that a scientific article found a miscarriage rate of 82% among women who received a messenger RNA vaccine against COVID-19 between 30 days and 20 weeks of pregnancy.
The Instagram post reaches 82% by selecting and manipulating data from a preliminary study.
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The publication reaches a conclusion based on a small sample of completed pregnancies analyzed by the researchers.
Most of the study participants are still pregnant or have not yet had a follow-up call with the authors of the article, to find out what happened to their pregnancies.
Early results have not found an increased risk of miscarriage associated with the COVID-19 vaccine
.
But until more reliable data is released, any statistics on this topic should be considered preliminary.
Therefore, we
qualify the statement circulating on Instagram as false
.