By Katherine Bortz
From the article:
Researchers in bioethics, maternal immunization, maternal-fetal medicine, obstetrics, pediatrics, philosophy and vaccine development and policy have collaborated to provide guidance promoting the inclusion of pregnant women in vaccine studies for emerging diseases.
Carleigh Krubiner, PhD, associate faculty at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and project director at the Center for Global Development, said that this guidance was spurred by the Zika epidemic, where pregnant women “could not be ignored in the response.” After the group developed guidance on including women in the response to Zika epidemics, they expanded their scope to include vaccination against other threats, including Ebola, Lassa fever and “Disease X.”
“Unless there are good scientific or ethical reasons showing that the risks of vaccination are likely to be greater than the protection it may offer against an infectious disease threat, pregnant women should be offered the option to be vaccinated,” she told Infectious Diseases in Children. “Our 22 recommendations identify concrete solutions and actions to make this the reality, to close the evidence gap for pregnant women in epidemic responses and ensure that they have fair access to safe and effective vaccines just like other affected populations.”
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The researchers acknowledged that these and the other recommendations provided in the guidance may be difficult to follow, but “addressing inequities in biomedical research and public health rarely comes cheaply or without hard work.”
“Because the guidance addresses a complex problem that is reinforced by existing norms across multiple systems, the recommendations are targeted at a wide range of actors in a position to make needed changes, including policymakers, funders, vaccine researchers, ethics committees, regulatory authorities, providers and aid workers,” Krubiner said. “Essentially, we are calling for a paradigm shift in the way people think about pregnant women in the contexts of vaccine research and epidemic responses.”
Read the full article here.