March 23 coronavirus news

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it hopes to enroll about 13,000 pregnant people for each of the three authorized coronavirus vaccines to see how pregnancy might affect vaccine safety. 

The agency will use existing and new safety monitoring systems, including its V-safe pregnancy registry, a CDC spokesperson told CNN Tuesday.

“We are leveraging existing systems to assess safety, as well as rapidly established new systems, to capture this information and we’re committed to doing it, and CDC is committed, to getting pregnant women the information that they need,” a CDC spokesperson told CNN.

V-safe is a smartphone-based tool that uses text messaging and web surveys to provide personalized health check-ins after people receive a Covid-19 vaccine. The V-safe COVID-19 pregnancy registry is for V-safe users who are willing to provide additional data and information to participate in further study through telephone interviews. 

As of March 22, 60,448 pregnant women have registered with the V-safe health database and 3,612 of them have additionally joined the V-safe pregnancy registry. The CDC is building the infrastructure to follow these women and add more participants to study, and noted that most women who have been contacted to participate agree to join, the spokesperson told CNN. 

Registry staff will call participants multiple times during their pregnancies and when the baby is about 3 months old. During these check-ins, mothers will be asked questions about medical and obstetric history, pregnancy complications, birth outcomes, and obstetric and they will be asked for access to their medical records to get a bigger picture and more detailed and technical information that participants may not recall, a CDC spokesperson told CNN.

source: cnn.com