{"id":8731,"date":"2025-06-03T13:24:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T17:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/?p=8731"},"modified":"2025-06-04T01:14:29","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T05:14:29","slug":"rfk-jr-s-stance-on-covid-vaccines-for-pregnant-women-is-profoundly-unethical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/news\/rfk-jr-s-stance-on-covid-vaccines-for-pregnant-women-is-profoundly-unethical\/","title":{"rendered":"RFK Jr.\u2019s stance on Covid vaccines for pregnant women is profoundly unethical"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy\u2019s proposal to end the government\u2019s existing <a target=\"_blank\" lang=\"en\" href=\"https:\/\/www.statnews.com\/2025\/05\/27\/covid-shots-pregnant-women-children-recommendation-change-hhs-secretary-kennedy\/\">Covid vaccine recommendation for healthy pregnant women<\/a>, if enacted, will be a major setback to decades\u2019 worth of efforts to advance the health of pregnant people and their babies.<\/p>\n<p>It also profoundly unethical.<\/p>\n<p>Pregnant people are consistently left behind in biomedical R&amp;D in ways that are deeply harmful to the health of both mother and child. In the decade before the Covid pandemic, consensus reports emerged denouncing this pregnancy evidence gap and providing road maps for how to ethically generate evidence during pregnancy within the confines of existing research regulations. I co-led one of these efforts, the <a target=\"_blank\" lang=\"en\" href=\"https:\/\/bioethics.jhu.edu\/research-and-outreach\/projects\/prevent\/prevent-guidance\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">PREVENT project<\/a>, initiated in response to the Zika epidemic and completed in fall 2019. PREVENT specifically focused on how to ethically include pregnant women in the development and deployment of new vaccines for emerging pandemic threats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy\u2019s proposal to end the government\u2019s existing <a target=\"_blank\" lang=\"en\" href=\"https:\/\/www.statnews.com\/2025\/05\/27\/covid-shots-pregnant-women-children-recommendation-change-hhs-secretary-kennedy\/\">Covid vaccine recommendation for healthy pregnant women<\/a>, if enacted, will be a major setback to decades\u2019 worth of efforts to advance the health of pregnant people and their babies.<\/p>\n<p>It also profoundly unethical.<\/p>\n<p>Pregnant people are consistently left behind in biomedical R&amp;D in ways that are deeply harmful to the health of both mother and child. In the decade before the Covid pandemic, consensus reports emerged denouncing this pregnancy evidence gap and providing road maps for how to ethically generate evidence during pregnancy within the confines of existing research regulations. I co-led one of these efforts, the <a target=\"_blank\" lang=\"en\" href=\"https:\/\/bioethics.jhu.edu\/research-and-outreach\/projects\/prevent\/prevent-guidance\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">PREVENT project<\/a>, initiated in response to the Zika epidemic and completed in fall 2019. PREVENT specifically focused on how to ethically include pregnant women in the development and deployment of new vaccines for emerging pandemic threats.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/news\/rfk-jr-s-stance-on-covid-vaccines-for-pregnant-women-is-profoundly-unethical\/\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">RFK Jr.\u2019s stance on Covid vaccines for pregnant women is profoundly unethical<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[18,1301,319,309,14,1252,51,15],"class_list":["post-8731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-covid-19","tag-kakistocracy","tag-pregnancy","tag-pro-virus-policies","tag-sars-cov-2","tag-trump-regime","tag-united-states","tag-vaccines","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8731"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8734,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8731\/revisions\/8734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stillcoviding.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}