Dr. Peter Hotez applauds CDC’s endorsement of vaccines for pregnant women in light of dangerous antivaccine rhetoric

Dr. Peter Hotez told CNBC that he’s glad the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance and urged pregnant women to get vaccinated, especially in light of the widespread misinformation campaigns geared toward pregnant women. 

“Unfortunately, the bad guys, the anti-vaccine groups, put out a lot of fake information claiming that Covid-19 vaccines can cause infertility,” said Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital.

“What they did was they copied and pasted their fake news about the HPV vaccine for cervical cancer and other cancer, which also wasn’t true, that they said caused infertility, and they just copy/pasted it right onto Covid-19 vaccines. It never had any truth to it.”

The CDC’s recommendation comes as the highly transmissible delta variant is causing another surge in Covid-19 infections and daily cases nationwide are surging past 100,000. About 23% of pregnant women have received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine as of July 31, according to CDC statistics.

Hotez underscored how dangerous contracting Covid-19 is for some pregnant women during a Wednesday evening interview on  “The News with Shepard Smith.” 

 “We’ve seen over the last year and a half lots and lots of pregnant women get very sick, go into the pediatric intensive care unit, lose their baby, lose their own lives because of Covid-19, and that’s the really scary piece,” Hotez said. “Pregnant women have not done well with this virus, and that’s the big message.”