Nearly 90% of babies who had to be hospitalized with covid-19 had mothers who didn’t get the vaccine while they were pregnant, according to released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings appear in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. This story also ran on .
It can be . Babies too young to be vaccinated had the highest covid hospitalization rate of any age group except people over 75. The study looked at infant medical data from October 2022 to April 2024 in 12 states and underscores the critical importance of vaccinating pregnant people.
It also echoes what physicians have anecdotally reported for more than three years — that people are still skeptical of covid vaccines due to persistent misinformation. Of the 1,470 infants sick enough to be hospitalized due to covid, severe outcomes occurred “frequently,” according to the report. Excluding newborns hospitalized at birth, about 1 in 5 infants hospitalized with covid required intensive care, and nearly 1 in 20 required a ventilator.
“These aren’t necessarily high-risk, ill newborns. These are just regular, full-term, healthy newborn kids who happen to get covid and wind up on a ventilator in the hospital,” said , a professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology and the director of the Infectious Diseases in Pregnancy Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Subscribe to KFF Health News' free Morning Briefing.
Babies can’t get the covid vaccination unti.