Pregnant Moms Who Get Covid Shots Have Healthier Babies

The worst-ever Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said last spring that pregnant women shouldn’t get covid shots. That was too dumb even for the toady cranks he illegally installed installed as his vaccine advisers, who last fall softly reversed that de-recommendation.

Actual experts like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have consistently recommended pregnant women get covid vaccines, because the science shows the vaccine does immense good and negligible harm. New research from Norway says the experts are right—vaccinating pregnant moms against covid is good for babies:

In this new study, researchers in Norway tracked 146,031 children born between March 2020 and December 2023 and looked at their medical records for up to two years after birth. The mothers of one in four of those children received the COVID vaccine while pregnant.

Babies exposed to the vaccine before birth were no more likely to visit the hospital for overall infections (of any kind) than those whose mothers did not get vaccinated in pregnancy. However, infants whose mothers were vaccinated were about half as likely to visit the hospital specifically for COVID in their first two months of life compared to babies not exposed to the vaccine in utero.

When babies were 3 to 5 months old, the risk of a hospital visit for COVID was 24% lower in those exposed to the vaccine, but the vaccine’s protection against COVID wore off by the time infants were older than 6 months [Tara Haelle, “Yep, a Mom’s COVID Shot During Pregnancy Protects Her Baby, a Large Study Finds,” NPR.org, 2026.03.25].

RFK’s vaccine advisers still say stupid things. This Norwegian research rebuts them, says Ohio pediatrician and medical professor Dr. Thomas Nguyen:

The findings are also helpful, Nguyen says, in rebutting claims made by Robert Malone, who Kennedy appointed as chair of the CDC committee that makes vaccine policy for the country. A federal judge ruled last week that Malone’s role on the committee, like those of other members appointed last year, is not legally valid because Kennedy did not appear to follow federal law when he replaced the members he dismissed from the committee.

Malone has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that “immune dysregulation” can result from the vaccine and cause more infections in those exposed to it. If that were true, this study would have found a higher risk of infection in babies whose mothers got the vaccine during pregnancy, Nguyen says. Since the researchers found no increased risk of overall infections, “the findings of this paper refute the whole idea of that being a problem,” he says [Haelle, 2026.03.25].