Medical experts are challenging the advice of those who say the COVID-19 vaccine is safe for pregnant women.
Dr. James Thorp, a well-known obstetrician and gynecologist board-certified in maternal-fetal medicine, claims he has seen many difficulties in pregnant women involving fetal death and miscarriage as a result of the vaccine.
Thorp, who has been in practice for over 42 years, said, “What I’ve seen in the last two years is unprecedented.”
As a doctor who treats 6,000–7,000 high-risk pregnant women each year, he told The Epoch Times that the COVID immunizations have caused several issues among his patients.
Though Dr. Thorp has noticed an increase in unfavorable pregnancy outcomes that he attributes to the COVID-19 vaccine, he claimed that attempts to quantify this effect are hindered by what he called “gag orders” on both physicians and nurses by medical boards, which he said restricted them from sharing information about the vaccine’s effects.
A publication that Thorp helped to author refers in particular to the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology’s (ACOG’s) “Statement Regarding Dissemination of COVID-19 Misinformation,” released in September 2021, which concerned disciplinary action of physicians that spread “misinformation” about COVID vaccines.
Over 10,000 of the approximately 450,000 pages of documents linked to Pfizer’s COVID studies were made public at the start of January after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was ordered to release said information.
According to the data, from December 1, 2020, through February 28, 2021, Pfizer received reports of 1,223 deaths and 42,086 serious events related to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine launch. The total number of vaccines administered is unknown.
Among the adverse occurrences, those affecting pregnant women are most concerning to doctors like Thorp. According to the records, there were 274 pregnancy-related adverse events, with 75 (or 27%) being labeled “serious.”
These side effects included uterine contraction and premature rupture of membranes during pregnancy.
Thorp also made it clear that not everyone had the injection when the vaccine was first provided.
“They were not all administered [on December 1, 2020],” said Thorp. “All the lots that were sent out were deep-frozen on-site and then they were administered slowly over that eight weeks.”
In the document mentioned above, the amount of BioNTech vaccines shipped worldwide at the time has been redacted.
Thorp wanted to know why that information was removed. The number would have served as the denominator for the adverse cases, allowing for the calculation of their frequency.
In contrast, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) advises pregnant women to get the COVID-19 vaccine to lower the risk of severe sickness and mortality during pregnancy.
The institute states that getting vaccinated should be a “priority” for pregnant women “to maximize maternal and fetal health.” It also urges lactating and recently pregnant women to seek the vaccine.
The ACOG notes that pregnant women infected with COVID-19 are at “an increased risk of preterm delivery, and there may be an increased risk of stillbirth.”
Former Pfizer Vice President Michael Yeadon, a 32-year-veteran of the pharmaceutical industry, said he had given warnings of potential side effects of the vaccine in pregnant women before retiring from the manufacturer.
In a statement to The Epoch Times, he highlighted several “mechanistic toxicological concerns” that he raised to Pfizer in December 2020, which he considered serious until they could be demonstrated not to occur in pregnant women.
Yeadon claimed that “adverse impacts on conception and ability to sustain a pregnancy were foreseeable.”
“It’s important to note that none of these gene-based agents had completed what’s called ‘reproductive toxicology,’” said Yeadon. “Over a year later, this battery of tests in animals still has not been done. So there was and still is no data package supporting safety in pregnancy or prior to conception.”
Yeadon and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg had anticipated that women’s immune systems might react to their placental protein when responding to the synthetic virus spike protein, which was reported in a pre-print document.
Yeadon also expressed concern that the mRNA products in the vaccines could build up in the ovaries.
According to Yeadon, in 2021, he came across two more pieces of research that made it considerably more probable that COVID-19 vaccines would negatively impact pregnancy.
Yeadon said it appeared as if someone attempted to disprove the warnings he and Wodarg had issued in December 2020 by searching for evidence of the negative effects he had predicted.
However, while the researchers stated that evidence showed his concerns were not an issue, Yeadon claims they had misrepresented the data, and their research had actually proved him right.
A separate study conducted in January 2022 by Dr. Heather Lipkind, a Yale Medicine obstetrician-gynecologist and high-risk pregnancy specialist, concluded pregnant women should get the vaccine.
“Women have been reluctant to receive the vaccine due to limited information about vaccine safety,” said Dr. Lipkind. “However, now, given the increasing rates of Omicron (at the time), protection provided by the vaccine is more important than ever.”
The study included more than 46,000 pregnant women, 10,064 of whom had received one or more doses of a COVID-19 vaccination. Of those women, the COVID-19 vaccine did not increase the risk for delivering a premature baby or having a baby born smaller than expected, both of which are connected to an increased likelihood of infant death and disability.