I know, the corporate media always put the attraction of readers and online clicks, before accurate public information, though they like to pretend the opposite.

Health correspondents seem particularly prone to the scare story.

For good scientific reasons there was uncertainty about the safety of vaccines for pregnant women and their babies. It takes time to gather enough data to make a safe recommendation. Does McCardle suggest experts should have just recommended a practice they could not support with hard evidence? Had we now data revealing more deaths among the vaccinated pregnant women, imagine the Herald’s headline.

What evidence does she have for mixed messages after official guidance in April was finalised? I can find none and she offers none, of politicians or their advisers doing so, but:

‘One mother’ and ‘reports surfaced’. Why do we see only one quote from one paper? Is that really all she has? Not even one Scottish case?

There were 613 936 live birth rates in 2020, in England & Wales and 46 809 in Scotland.

There are around 51 000 midwives in the UK.

One?

Journalism?

Missing from the Herald report is any research into the outcomes for the larger number of pregnant women being taken into ICU in the Delta wave. A comprehensive study from the US found that the in-hospital death rate among non-pregnant women was significantly higher than among pregnant women:

https://www.healio.com/news/primary-care/20210510/rare-study-finds-low-inhospital-mortality-among-pregnant-women-with-covid19

Does that mean the increased tendency to take pregnant women into ICU in the Delta wave, was a good thing, saving lives?