My midwife group is recommending the vaccine, as they do with seasonal flu. (and it's not an interventive group--the C/S rate is 6%, and 75% of women birth without epidurals) I am not particularly worried about this vaccine, as the formulation of it is NOT new or untested. My understanding is that it is being made the same way every flu vaccine is made, except with this one they actually know the virus they are making it against, whereas with seasonal flu it is a guess. Pregnant women do need to think about how they want to approach this, and as always it needs to be an individual decision, based on risks and benefits.
I do want to point out, though, a few misleading things. First, with all due respect to the midwife that was mentioned, it really isn't true that pregnant women don't get sick in flu season. You can take care of yourself very well, but a lot of us work in busy offices, take care of young children who are sick a lot, or have kids in school or on social situations where they'll get exposed and bring germs home. Pregnant women get sick just as much as other people, and it has been documented that respiratory illnesses that have pneumonia as a consequence, like flu and chickenpox, do in fact have significantly more risks for pregnant women. If they get the complications, they get sicker.
And in that article about Guillian-Barre syndrome--yes, 25 people died. But that was over 30 years ago, not this year, as the headline implies. The woman they profiled in the article did not get GBS from a flu vaccine, either, it said she probably got it as a result of some other virus. GBS is not just a consequence of vaccines, it can be a consequence of viruses in general. Including the flu! So saying we should avoid flu vaccine because one might get GBS, when you can get it as a complication of the flu itself, is not logical. Finally, although I know it sounds terrible, 25 people dying as a consequence of a flu vaccine is an *incredibly* small risk. Nationally the normal seasonal flu kills 40,000 people each year. And that's in a regular, normal year! The risk of the flu is so, so, SO much higher than the risk of the vaccine.
What we need to think about when we think of vaccines is the risk of the disease vs. the risk of the vaccine; that is the only reasonable way to consider it. That is a personal decision, like I said, but it should be well-informed. Ponder the way you think about risk, and think about actual risk vs. perceived risk--they are often very different. (the risk of getting heart disease is much higher than the risk of getting breast cancer, for example, but most of us don't think about it that way) So when you think about vaccines, consider the actual, documented risk of getting the disease, consider the actual risk to your health if you do get it, then consider the actual, documented risk of getting the vaccine. Compare the likelihoods, compare the severities, and then decide.
Annie
