COVID vaccine not linked to risk of child development delay: Study

(NewsNation) — Children born to mothers who received a COVID-19 vaccine while pregnant were not at an increased risk of neurodevelopmental delay through the first 18 months of their life, according to a new study.

The findings published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics suggest getting vaccinated while pregnant was safe, a major question that expectant mothers were faced with during the height of the pandemic.

“To our knowledge, this represents the first meaningful evidence regarding the safety of maternal COVID-19 vaccination from the standpoint of early offspring neurodevelopment,” the authors wrote in the study’s conclusion.

Researchers led by Eleni G. Jaswa at the University of California, San Francisco studied nearly 2,500 pregnant individuals who were within 10 weeks’ gestation between May 2020 to August 2021. They measured newborns’ scores on the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, a screening tool that assesses developmental progress in children up to age 5 1/2.

The pregnancies yielded 2,261 and 1,940 infants aged 12 and 18 months, respectively, with such assessments.

At 12 months, 471 of the 1,541 infants (30.6%) who had been exposed to a vaccine in the womb screened abnormally for developmental delay, compared to 203 of 720 (28.2%) unexposed infants who screened abnormally.

At 18 months, 20% of exposed infants screened abnormally, compared to 23% of unexposed infants.

Male infants were more likely to screen abnormally than females at age 12 months and 18 months, regardless of vaccine exposure. Among girls, there was no difference in risk of an abnormal screen at 12 months, but those who had been exposed to a vaccine were less likely to screen abnormally at 18 months than unexposed infants.

There was no difference in prevalence of abnormal screens based on the trimester in which the vaccine was received.

The study authors suggested more long-term research be conducted to corroborate the findings.

“Our findings more generally underscore the importance of ongoing prospective investigations in large, diverse cohorts of children across development, to provide an evidence basis for real-time clinical guidance in the setting of novel exposures to mothers and infants,” the authors wrote. “As our basic science colleagues tease out the dynamic mechanistic underpinnings of in utero exposures, together we can transform these early data into knowledge to promote the health and well-being of our communities.”

In August, a separate study found that getting the COVID-19 vaccine or booster during pregnancy can be beneficial for pregnant women and their babies.

The study found that the vaccine given to the mother did transfer to the infant, providing some protection against the COVID-19 virus to the baby for its first few months of life, the report said. Those who received the booster shots had substantially more antibodies against the disease than the women who only received the two-dose vaccination.

NewsNation digital producer Devan Markham contributed to this report.