Data from Rambam hospital in Israel reveals a stillbirth, miscarriage and abortion (SBMA) rate of 6% among women who never received a COVID-19 vaccine, compared to 8% among women who were vaccinated with at least one dose (and never had a SARS-Cov-2 infection).1
That’s a statistically significant odds ratio of 1.36 (CI 1.0-1.9), meaning your odds of having a stillbirth, abortion or miscarriage are 1.36 times higher if you are vaccinated.2
Another way of putting it is that the SBMA rate among vaccinated women was nearly 34% higher than the rate among unvaccinated women. This difference is statistically significant at the 95% confidence interval based on a Chi-square test of significance.
One possible explanation is that older women and women with co-morbidities were more likely to get vaccinated, and that explains the difference. It’s possible, but it has to be shown. This paper recently published in JAMA on live births based on Israeli electronic medical records shows that vaccinated and unvaccinated mothers were in many ways very similar.
Vaccinated women were only about 1 year older on average than unvaccinated women in terms of average age (30.5 vs. 31.6 yrs) and if anything, the unvaccinated mothers were less healthy: more of them were obese and smoked; and they were far more likely to have had a SARS-Cov-2 infection during pregnancy.
But regardless of what reason for these differences is, the signal in these data are too strong and the issue too important to be dismissed with hand-waving arguments based on conjecture. That would be reckless.
We can get some purchase on the “unhealthy vaccinee” hypothesis by looking at the trend over time. If younger, healthier women were less likely to be vaccinated, then the differences across months should be fairly stable. But the differences are actually quite striking.
The bar chart below shows what percentage of births among vaccinated women were SBMA and what percentage were live births, and compares this to the percentage among unvaccinated women. (Vaccinated means the women had received at least one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.)3
