https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-covid-vaccines-are-likely-safe-for-pregnant-people/ > As the initial priority groups are being offered a COVID-19 vaccine in the U.S., one population in particular faces a difficult decision: Pregnant people who are health care personnel or essential workers—categories that are eligible for the early phases of the vaccination program—“may choose to be vaccinated,” according to the latest official guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The problem is that there are scant data available on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant individuals. They were not included in the clinical trials, as has historically been the case with most vaccines and drugs. > “We’ve put pregnant women between a rock and a hard place,” says Melanie Maykin, a maternal-fetal medicine fellow at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She belongs to a committee at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine that advocates for equitable care during pregnancy. In a recent study, Maykin and her colleagues noted that an evaluation last spring had found all nine global COVID-19 vaccine trials at the time listed pregnancy as an explicit exclusion criterion.