Dr. Jessica Shepherd, a women’s health expert and chief medical officer of “Hers,” discusses the recent conflicting information on the COVID vaccine for children and pregnant women.
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Well, Madna says its next generation COVID vaccine has been approved by the FDA with restrictions. The updated vaccine has been approved for people ages 65 and older or people between the ages of 12 and 64 who have an underlying condition that puts them at risk for COVID. Madna’s announcement comes after a major reversal from the CDC, which is updating its recommendation for CO 19 vaccines and children. Families will now be allowed to choose to vaccinate their kids for COVID after consulting with their medical provider and are likely able to have the shot covered by their health insurance. The recommendation contradicts guidance by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Earlier this week, he announced COVID shots would be dropped from the immunization schedule for healthy kids and pregnant women. So, joining me now to break this all down is Dr. Dr. Jessica Shepard, women’s health expert and chief medical officer of hers. Dr. Shepard, always great to speak with you. Thanks for joining us. So, this has been a a confusing week here and what appears to be conflicting information on the COVID vaccine for children and pregnant women. So, what’s actually going on? How should people approach this new guidance? You know, Whit, I think that there’s always going to be this confusion when we think of CO because one thing we know is CO is not going away. So as we start to see these recommendations change, I think this is something that we really need to in the health care community, but also for patients to truly understand what CO is and how it can be impacted. Now, as far as the vaccine, the amount of work that they’ve done and from the data that we have so far, there really is no evidence of obvious safety risks. So with that being said, especially for pregnant women, it’s very important to understand that the immune system during pregnancy is not as strong as those who are not pregnant. So when we have a vaccine that may again cause severe illness during pregnancy, this is where we really need the conversation for women to understand that the vaccine may prevent them from having the disease during pregnancy and therefore having worse complications. So again, we see that there is going to be a recommendation or a choice, but that choice really needs to be individualized and especially for children as well who we saw during the the pandemic really had a heightened response to CO and we saw a lot of deaths from I think the difficult thing for a lot of people is all the different layers to it. It’s like if this then that or or or you know whereas it’s not so cut and dry as you know take it or don’t take it. So what are you actually telling your patients? That is such a great question. Specifically for my patients and many of the colleagues that I talk about with COVID vaccine is we always want best case scenario and best case scenario especially during pregnancy is healthy mom healthy baby and the way to get that is to eliminate as much processes and diseases that occur during the pregnancy alone because we know what happens with that immune system that’s not at its full function. So, I typically recommend for my patients still to get the vaccine because I know once someone does get COVID, then the vaccine really isn’t going to be applicable at that point and we really want to do what’s best for mom and baby. I’d also like to ask you about this new study that’s showing a sharp decline in maternal mental health as more mothers are calling their mental health fair or poor. What are the impacts of poor mental health among mothers and what can be done about it? Yeah, this was quite disturbing to see this this study that was just released from JAMAMA is that we are still seeing a decline in mental and physical health as reported by mothers that we saw and a lot of those mothers when we looked at really the the reasons why they had that was again due to lack of access and resources. So clearly we still have this issue when we think of equity of health that is still being missed and those who don’t have as much resources are going to have some of those outcomes which were noted and one in 12 mothers report a decline in their mental health. That’s pretty profound and so I think that we need stronger studies. I think that we really need to look at health care access and what that needs to be for all mothers across the board and looking again at after the pregnancy in the postpartum phase. We still do not have good coverage for the postpartum phase and even into early childhood. Dr. Jessica Shepard, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it. Thanks, Wick.
