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Thursday, November 24, 2022 5:20:35 PM
“God, No, Not Another Case.” COVID-Related Stillbirths Didn’t Have to Happen.
by Duaa Eldeib
"ooster, NEVER should Trump's negligent disregard for virus protection for America be forgotten. "
Pregnant women were most badly let down by the Trump administration in it's initial abysmal reaction to the pandemic.
Aug. 4, 6 a.m. EDT
Late one afternoon last October, Dr. Shelley Odronic sat in her office and, just as she had thousands of times before, slid a rectangular glass slide onto her microscope.
A pathologist who works in rural Ohio, Odronic leaned forward to examine tissue from the placenta of a woman who had recently given birth. She increased the magnification on the microscope. Never had she seen so many tiny, congealed reservoirs of blood or such severe inflammation of the tissue, a sign the placenta had been fighting an infection.
“Right away, I knew it wasn’t compatible with life,” Odronic said.
She asked her secretary to print out the patient’s chart. In dark letters were the words “fetal demise.” A stillbirth, the death of a fetus at 20 weeks or more of pregnancy. But that didn’t solve the mystery. Odronic had examined many placentas from pregnancies that ended in stillbirth. None looked like this — withered and scarred.
Dr. Shelley Odronic works in her office in Lima, Ohio. Odronic, a pathologist, noticed severe damage in the placentas of pregnant people who had COVID-19. Credit: Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica
Odronic kept reading. No chronic medical conditions. Good prenatal care. Then, buried in the middle of the report, she spotted something. Seven days before the stillbirth, the mother had tested positive for COVID-19. Odronic wondered if the virus could explain the damage to the placenta. In the world of placenta pathology, a new affliction is unusual, especially one so dramatic in presentation and so devastating in effect.
Her mind traveled to Dr. Amy Heerema-McKenney, a pathologist at Cleveland Clinic and an expert on the placenta, who had trained Odronic during residency. Odronic went to sleep that night with a pit in her stomach and a plan to call her former teacher in the morning.
Heerema-McKenney was in her office when the phone rang. As she listened, she knew that what Odronic was describing was what she and her colleagues had observed repeatedly over the past several months: a patient positive for the coronavirus, a placenta destroyed by COVID-19, a baby stillborn.
Their next discovery was equally stunning. None of the stillbirths they studied involved a pregnant person who had been fully vaccinated. The doctors checked with colleagues across the country and around the world. The fatal pattern held.
IMAGES
Placenta slides (first image) in Dr. Amy Heerema-McKenney’s office at the Cleveland Clinic. Heerema-McKenney (second image), a placenta
pathologist, works in the lab. She noticed the impact COVID-19 was having on placentas and stillbirths. Credit: Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica
Unvaccinated women who contracted COVID-19 during pregnancy were at a higher risk of stillbirths. They also were more likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit, give birth prematurely or die. Yet their greatest protection — the COVID-19 vaccine — sat largely untouched, buried under doubt, polluted by disinformation.
How Misinformation About COVID Vaccines and Pregnancy Took Root Early On and Why It Won’t Go Away
https://www.propublica.org/article/covid-misinformation-pregnancy-vaccine-testing
Pharmaceutical companies and government officials failed to ensure that pregnant people were included in the early development of the COVID-19 vaccine, a calamitous decision made amid the urgency of a rapidly spreading pandemic. That decision left pregnant people with little research to rely on when making a critical decision on how best to keep the babies growing inside of them safe.
At the same time that research was excluding pregnant people from vaccine trials, a full-scale assault on vaccination was unfolding online. Taking advantage of the lack of data, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and even some medical professionals spread false claims about the vaccine’s safety in pregnancy, leading many pregnant people to delay or refuse the vaccine. Even now, with numerous studies unequivocally announcing the safety of the vaccine for pregnant people, some doctors have failed to communicate the dangers of COVID-19 to pregnant people or the vaccine’s role in mitigating it.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contributed to the confusion with vague early messaging about whether pregnant people should get vaccinated. While Americans lined up at pharmacies and stalked vaccine websites in hopes of securing a shot last year, pregnant people had some of the lowest vaccination rates among adults, with only 35% fully vaccinated by last November. Meanwhile, many Americans were already moving on to their boosters after federal officials that month expanded eligibility for the additional shots to anyone 18 or older. And much of the country was beginning to return to pre-pandemic life. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, for instance, set the record for the busiest day of air travel since March 2020.
Continued - https://www.propublica.org/article/covid-maternity-stillbirth-vaccines-pregnancy
by Duaa Eldeib
"ooster, NEVER should Trump's negligent disregard for virus protection for America be forgotten. "
Pregnant women were most badly let down by the Trump administration in it's initial abysmal reaction to the pandemic.
Aug. 4, 6 a.m. EDT
Late one afternoon last October, Dr. Shelley Odronic sat in her office and, just as she had thousands of times before, slid a rectangular glass slide onto her microscope.
A pathologist who works in rural Ohio, Odronic leaned forward to examine tissue from the placenta of a woman who had recently given birth. She increased the magnification on the microscope. Never had she seen so many tiny, congealed reservoirs of blood or such severe inflammation of the tissue, a sign the placenta had been fighting an infection.
“Right away, I knew it wasn’t compatible with life,” Odronic said.
She asked her secretary to print out the patient’s chart. In dark letters were the words “fetal demise.” A stillbirth, the death of a fetus at 20 weeks or more of pregnancy. But that didn’t solve the mystery. Odronic had examined many placentas from pregnancies that ended in stillbirth. None looked like this — withered and scarred.
Dr. Shelley Odronic works in her office in Lima, Ohio. Odronic, a pathologist, noticed severe damage in the placentas of pregnant people who had COVID-19. Credit: Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica
Odronic kept reading. No chronic medical conditions. Good prenatal care. Then, buried in the middle of the report, she spotted something. Seven days before the stillbirth, the mother had tested positive for COVID-19. Odronic wondered if the virus could explain the damage to the placenta. In the world of placenta pathology, a new affliction is unusual, especially one so dramatic in presentation and so devastating in effect.
Her mind traveled to Dr. Amy Heerema-McKenney, a pathologist at Cleveland Clinic and an expert on the placenta, who had trained Odronic during residency. Odronic went to sleep that night with a pit in her stomach and a plan to call her former teacher in the morning.
Heerema-McKenney was in her office when the phone rang. As she listened, she knew that what Odronic was describing was what she and her colleagues had observed repeatedly over the past several months: a patient positive for the coronavirus, a placenta destroyed by COVID-19, a baby stillborn.
Their next discovery was equally stunning. None of the stillbirths they studied involved a pregnant person who had been fully vaccinated. The doctors checked with colleagues across the country and around the world. The fatal pattern held.
IMAGES
Placenta slides (first image) in Dr. Amy Heerema-McKenney’s office at the Cleveland Clinic. Heerema-McKenney (second image), a placenta
pathologist, works in the lab. She noticed the impact COVID-19 was having on placentas and stillbirths. Credit: Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica
Unvaccinated women who contracted COVID-19 during pregnancy were at a higher risk of stillbirths. They also were more likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit, give birth prematurely or die. Yet their greatest protection — the COVID-19 vaccine — sat largely untouched, buried under doubt, polluted by disinformation.
How Misinformation About COVID Vaccines and Pregnancy Took Root Early On and Why It Won’t Go Away
https://www.propublica.org/article/covid-misinformation-pregnancy-vaccine-testing
Pharmaceutical companies and government officials failed to ensure that pregnant people were included in the early development of the COVID-19 vaccine, a calamitous decision made amid the urgency of a rapidly spreading pandemic. That decision left pregnant people with little research to rely on when making a critical decision on how best to keep the babies growing inside of them safe.
At the same time that research was excluding pregnant people from vaccine trials, a full-scale assault on vaccination was unfolding online. Taking advantage of the lack of data, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and even some medical professionals spread false claims about the vaccine’s safety in pregnancy, leading many pregnant people to delay or refuse the vaccine. Even now, with numerous studies unequivocally announcing the safety of the vaccine for pregnant people, some doctors have failed to communicate the dangers of COVID-19 to pregnant people or the vaccine’s role in mitigating it.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contributed to the confusion with vague early messaging about whether pregnant people should get vaccinated. While Americans lined up at pharmacies and stalked vaccine websites in hopes of securing a shot last year, pregnant people had some of the lowest vaccination rates among adults, with only 35% fully vaccinated by last November. Meanwhile, many Americans were already moving on to their boosters after federal officials that month expanded eligibility for the additional shots to anyone 18 or older. And much of the country was beginning to return to pre-pandemic life. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, for instance, set the record for the busiest day of air travel since March 2020.
Continued - https://www.propublica.org/article/covid-maternity-stillbirth-vaccines-pregnancy
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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