• Posted May 15, 2025

Study Finds No Link Between COVID Vaccine And Miscarriage Risk

THURSDAY, May 15, 2025 (HealthDay News) — There’s no link between the COVID-19 vaccine and miscarriage, a new study says.

COVID poses significant risks to pregnant women, including preterm birth, maternal death and need for ICU care for either mother or baby following delivery, researchers said.

But vaccination rates among pregnant women remain low, due in part to misinformation about the vaccine’s safety, researchers said in background notes.

In this new study, researchers found no association between miscarriage and COVID-19 vaccination, when comparing women with successful live births to those who miscarried.

“We hope that data such as ours are providing increasing reassurance that the vaccine is safe, and that we will see those rates go up,” said lead researcher Dr. Sangini Sheth, an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at Yale School of Medicine.

As with most clinical trials, pregnant women were initially excluded from trials for the COVID vaccine.

Despite this, the vaccine is recommended for pregnant women due to greater risks of pregnancy complications if they catch COVID, researchers said.

“The CDC recommendation was to not withhold the vaccine from pregnant women because it could provide lifesaving benefits to both mom and fetus,” Sheth said.

A number of studies conducted since the vaccine’s approval have confirmed that it’s safe for pregnant women, researchers said. For example, the vaccines have no association with stillbirths, and vaccinated women are more likely to have healthier pregnancies.

For this study, researchers analyzed electronic health record data to determine whether the vaccine was associated with a greater risk of miscarriage.

The team compared 296 patients who suffered a miscarriage with 592 who had a healthy birth, and found no link involving the vaccine, according to their report published recently in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.

There also was no link between miscarriage risk and the number of vaccinations a woman had gotten, or whether she’d gotten the Pfizer-BioNTech (Comirnaty) or Moderna (Spikevax) vaccine, results show.

“This is a rigorously conducted study that continues to show that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe during pregnancy,” Sheth said. “For women who are early in pregnancy or those who are thinking about getting pregnant, given the risks of COVID-19 disease, they should feel encouraged to go ahead and get vaccinated if they are not already.”

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on COVID vaccination for pregnant women.

SOURCE: Yale School of Medicine, news release, May 7, 2025