Latest update February 6th, 2025 7:27 AM
Pregnant women, nursing mothers now required to be vaccinated – Health Minister
Kaieteur News – As part of a comprehensive effort to reduce the number of positive COVID-19 infections among pregnant and breastfeeding women, the Ministry of Health is now requiring that they get vaccinated. During yesterday‘s COVID-19 update, Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony announced that the Ministry will be rolling out a new vaccination campaign targeting these two groups of women.
Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony.
The Minister explained that, earlier this year, there was a lot of skepticism surrounding pregnant and breastfeeding women taking the COVID-19 vaccines as there was limited scientific data on the issue.
However, he noted that recent studies have shown that the vaccines are safe for those women to take. In addition, the increase in COVID-19 infections in pregnant women and new mothers, has prompted a more focused rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines among these women.
“Most of the obstetric societies globally have been encouraging pregnant women to get vaccinated in any one of the trimesters whether first, second, or third, because the vaccine is safe and it is protective,” the Health Minister added.
He explained that there were some issues of verifying the status of the women, who claim to be pregnant or nursing so as to not take the vaccines.
The Minister further said: “In terms of pregnant women, they have to be enrolled at one of our clinics, so we can verify the pregnancy and that would be done at any one of the clinics. So that’s how we’ll verify that. In terms of how do we know who is breastfeeding, again, when you were discharged from your clinic, having been pregnant and delivered the baby, when you’re discharged from the hospital or the clinic, you will get a clinic card.”
In the meantime, Dr. Anthony said there have been a significant number of pregnant women who became infected with the disease.
As such, he is urged breastfeeding and pregnant women to visit any one of the vaccination sites to take their jabs, and save their lives.
“We have seen a number of cases of persons who are pregnant coming in with COVID-19. We have seen that at the Ocean View Hospital, we have seen that here at the Georgetown Hospital, and at several of our other regional hospitals and all of these women are unvaccinated.
“Some of them, luckily would have a milder form of the disease, while others go on to have a very severe presentation of the disease and in a few cases, we had to do emergencies in C-sections. This can be avoided if women take the vaccine during their pregnancy.”
While the ministry has been offering the AstraZeneca, Sinopharm or Sputnik V vaccines to women in this category, Dr. Anthony noted that a recent survey was done, which indicated that many of them would prefer to take the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. There have been four maternal deaths recorded this year after the women were infected with COVID-19.
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