UKHSA adds Pregnancy and Immunosuppressed Sections to Vaccine Surveillance Report

This week's report is more substantial. But some content appears to be managed advocacy rather than raw surveillance.

The UK Health Security Agency’s Vaccine Surveillance Report for Week 47 has been published.

The new section on Vaccination in immunosuppressed individuals is one paragraph and one table, which I’ll look into a bit later.

The new section on Vaccination in pregnancy is much more substantial, running to 9 pages, and a plethora of tables and charts. The section begins:

Vaccination of pregnant women alongside their peers is recommended in the UK and other countries as an important way to protect pregnant women and their unborn children against COVID-19 disease. Vaccination of pregnant women is strongly recommended by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Royal College of Midwives.

The opening, and enduring theme is this: It’s completely safe to be vaccinated while pregnant.

I wondered what prompted such a substantial new section in this weekly report, and then I remembered this article Investigation launched into abnormal spike in newborn baby deaths in Scotland

AN investigation has been launched into a spike in deaths among newborn babies in Scotland.

Official figures reveal that 21 infants died during September within 28 days of birth, causing the neonatal mortality rate to breach an upper warning threshold known as the 'control limit' for the first time in at least four years.

That spike is July, so unlikely to be RSV. I guess it could be an aberration of some kind.

But it’s not just Scotland. To the distant west, Canada has seen Stillbirths Exploding in Fully Vaccinated Mothers

Dr. Daniel Nagase exposes the exploding cases of stillbirths in fully vaccinated Canadian women with 86 in 6 months in Waterloo, Ontario, which normally sees 5-6 per year. B.C. saw 13 stillbirths in 24 hours.

The video transcript has been helpfully provided here over at Steve Kirsch’s place.

Again, correlation is not causation, but I’d be interested if anyone knows where to find weekly stillbirth statistics. It feels like more investigation is warranted.

UPDATE: I decided to drill into the Scottish data a little further, and managed to located the appropriate dataset from which I generated this chart: