Influenza: Vaccination during pregnancy also protects the baby

Influenza vaccination has been highly recommended for pregnant women for years to protect themselves from serious diseases. This also applies to Austria. An American study now shows that this immunization also protects newborns and children in the first six months.

The scientific study was supervised by Laila Sahni from the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, Texas) and was recently published in the American Journal of Medicine. JAMA Pediatrics published. She and her colleagues examined how effective influenza vaccination during pregnancy was in protecting babies younger than six months old from infections requiring hospitalization or emergency room treatment.

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Scientists used this in the study German medical journal, data from the New Vaccine Surveillance Network for 2016/2017 to 2019/2020 influenza waves. The analysis included children younger than six months of age who were treated in the emergency room or hospitalized for acute respiratory illness at seven children's hospitals in the United States.

In total, data on 3764 newborns were analysed, of whom 223 had influenza. The mothers of 2007 children were vaccinated. The rate of protection against infection with influenza viruses among children was relatively high, at about 34 percent. This is due to the transfer of protective antibodies from the pregnant mother to the fetus. Depending on the age group, protection rates ranging from 40 to 80 percent are recorded for those who are directly vaccinated.

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According to the results of the American study, vaccinating pregnant women against influenza is also a classic example of preventing serious diseases. Children of vaccinated mothers were about 40 percent less likely to be hospitalized with influenza and about 20 percent less likely to be treated in emergency rooms.

The medical journal wrote: “In newborns younger than three months old, the effectiveness of vaccination was 53 percent.” The effect was particularly high, at 52%, in children born to mothers who were vaccinated during the last three months of pregnancy. When vaccinated in the first or second trimester of pregnancy, the protective effect was only 17 percent.