Dr. Peter Hotez applauds the CDC’s endorsement of vaccines for pregnant girls amid harmful anti-vaccine rhetoric

Dr. Peter Hotez told CNBC he was glad the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated their guidelines and urged pregnant women to get vaccinated, especially given the widespread misinformation campaigns targeting pregnant women.

“Unfortunately, the bad guys, the anti-vaccine groups, have published a lot of fake information claiming that Covid-19 vaccines can cause infertility,” said Hotez, co-director of the vaccine development center at Texas Children’s Hospital.

“They copied and pasted their fake news about the HPV vaccine for cervical cancer and other cancers, which was also wrong, that they said caused infertility, and they just copied / pasted it right on Covid-19 vaccines . There was never any truth to it. “

The CDC’s recommendation comes because the highly transmissible Delta variant is causing a further increase in Covid-19 infections and the daily cases nationwide are rising over 100,000. According to CDC statistics, by July 31, around 23% of pregnant women had received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine.

Hotez underlined in an interview on Wednesday evening in “The News with Shepard Smith” how dangerous it is for some pregnant women to become infected with Covid-19.

“We have seen many and many pregnant women over the past year and a half who got very sick, went to the pediatric intensive care unit, lost their baby, lost their own life to Covid-19, and this is the really scary piece” “, said Hotez. “Pregnant women have not coped well with this virus, and that is the big message.”