S1E79 / Women’s Health: Fertile Ground for COVID Myths / Andrea Edlow, Stephanie Gaw, Alice Lu-Culligan, Leena Mithal, Steve Stecklow

EPIDEMIC with Dr. Celine Gounder

KFF Health News and Just Human Productions

Society & Culture, #Eradication, Medicine, #Covid, Science, Life Sciences, #Sarscov2, Documentary, #Coronavirus, #Covid19, Health & Fitness, #Smallpox

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"Pregnant women who have SARS-CoV-2 are more likely to be admitted to the ICU, to need a ventilator and are more likely to die than women of the same age who are not pregnant. Pregnancy definitely makes getting COVID-19 much more dangerous." -Andrea Edlow Some of the most persistent myths about coronavirus and the vaccines developed to fight it have to do with women's health. In this episode, we'll hear about the latest science when it comes to topics like COVID and a woman's fertility, breastfeeding, and how vaccines can help a pregnant woman protect her child in the womb. We'll also address the legacy of excluding pregnant women from clinical trials and how that history complicated caring for pregnant and lactating women during the pandemic. This podcast was created by Just Human Productions. We're powered and distributed by Simplecast. We're supported, in part, by listeners like you. #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #COVID #coronavirus

Transcript

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0:00.0	Pregnant and lactating women have been sort of a taboo group to study for forever.
0:12.2	I think this is a general reflection of kind of how our society has treated women in
0:17.5	the past and also these particular women's health issues.
0:21.8	The goal of COVID-19 vaccines and pregnancy isn't to protect the baby, the goal is to protect
0:27.5	the mothers.
0:39.2	You're listening to Epidemic, the podcast about the science, public health and social
0:43.6	impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. I'm your host, Dr. Saline Gounder.
0:57.9	Steve Steclo is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with Reuters. He's based in London.
1:07.8	Earlier this spring, Steve and his colleague Andrew McCaskill wrote a report looking into the
1:12.9	origins of one of the most harmful myths about COVID vaccines and the man behind it, Michael Yeeden.
1:18.7	Michael Yeeden is a former scientist from Pfizer who'd worked in the UK from around 1995 to 2011.
1:30.5	He was an expert in allergies and respiratory diseases, but he's become this big figure in the
1:40.4	anti-vax movement. Yeeden wouldn't speak to Steve for his story, so some of the reporting
1:46.2	was based on Yeeden's public Twitter account.
1:48.8	So in the beginning, interesting enough, Dr. Yeeden's tweets, we talked about how basically
1:54.4	how the world needed a vaccine and that was one of the only hopes for it. This was back in March
1:59.4	of last year. But by April, he started becoming more skeptical about vaccines and other things.
2:08.0	Yeeden started to speak out against lockdowns in the United Kingdom. He became increasingly
2:13.2	strident in his opinions. Those positions attracted more attention, and he started being
2:18.6	interviewed on radio and TV. He started making these predictions that there would be no second wave,
2:24.0	and in the UK, there was a huge second wave. When we wrote our story in March, I think 80,000 more
2:31.0	people had died during that second wave. Steve says former colleagues of Yeeden he interviewed
	...

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