Canada : Hospitals urge pregnant women to get vaccinated
Four major Canadian paediatric hospitals have warned that with “the rise of Omicron, hospitals are starting to see a disturbing, potential new trend – admissions of infants with Covid19”.
Since mid-December, CHEO, eastern Ontario’s children’s hospital in Ottawa, and Hamilton’s McMaster Children’s Hospital have admitted a total of six babies under the age of 12 months with the virus.
The group of hospitals said infants’ immune systems have difficulty fighting disease especially without maternal antibodies transferred during pregnancy from vaccination.
If a mother has not been vaccinated or infected, an infant does not have the protection of maternal antibodies transferred during the third trimester of pregnancy. This has been well-studied in other infectious diseases, such as flu and whooping cough.
