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Only a little over 10% of pregnant women were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by early May, researchers found.

By May 8, 11.1% of pregnant women completed their COVID-19 vaccination series compared with 24.9% of non-pregnant women ages 18-49 during the same time period, reported Hilda Razzaghi, PhD, of the CDC, and colleagues.

Older pregnant women were more likely to be vaccinated, as well as non-Hispanic Asian women and non-Hispanic white women, the authors wrote in an early edition of the

Pregnant women are classified as being at risk for severe COVID-19 illness, the researchers noted, and CDC data recently reaffirmed the safety of COVID vaccines in this population, showing that incidence of adverse outcomes in vaccinated pregnant women was similar to that reported prior to the pandemic.

While pregnant women were excluded from vaccine clinical trials, both CDC and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said pregnant women should not be prevented from receiving the vaccine, and advised shared clinical decision-making.

President Biden declared that all states should offer all adults , so an obvious limitation of the study could be that some pregnant women did not have a chance to complete their vaccination series by May 8.

The authors examined data from , and identified 135,968 pregnant women from Dec. 14, 2020 to May 8, 2021. Among pregnant women, 16.3% received at least one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, or Johnson & Johnson vaccine, while 5.3% "initiated" vaccination (one dose of the two-dose mRNA vaccine series), and 11.1% completed vaccination while pregnant.

Vaccination rates were highest for women ages 35-49, with 22.7% receiving at least one dose of vaccine compared with only 5.5% of women ages 18-24, who had the lowest vaccination rates. Vaccination was most common among non-Hispanic Asian women (24.7%) and non-Hispanic white women (19.7%), with lower rates among Hispanic women (11.9%) and non-Hispanic Black women (6.0%).

However, the authors noted that cumulative vaccination rates among pregnant women increased weekly since March 13 across all racial and ethnic groups, which "might be attributable to inclusion of pregnancy among the conditions that increase risk for severe COVID-19 and thus for prioritization for early allocation of COVID-19 vaccines."

Razzaghi and co-authors hypothesized on reasons for the lower coverage, including limited safety data, cultural and language barriers, and "need for increased vaccine confidence among healthcare providers and pregnant women."

"Making accurate and timely information available to healthcare providers and pregnant women could increase confidence and thus acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines in this population," the authors wrote. "In addition, vaccine misinformation and hesitancy should be addressed."

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