This week on “The First Opinion Podcast,” I talk with Catherine Mezzacappa and Ruth Faden about the long-standing reluctance to test and administer new vaccines, including those for Covid-19, in people who are pregnant.
Mezzacappa, a newly vaccinated expectant mother and internal medicine resident physician at Yale New Haven Hospital, wrote recently about her experience being vaccinated while pregnant in a First Opinion titled “The effect of Covid-19 vaccines will — finally — be tested in pregnant people like me.” Faden, the founder and longtime director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and a leader in making vaccine testing and distribution more equitable, railed against this hesitation in a powerful 2018 First Opinion she wrote with two colleagues titled “An ‘indefensible’ decision: not vaccinating pregnant and lactating women in an Ebola outbreak.”
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