COVID-19 vaccines and pregnancy: What the data from Israel shows

Four Lost Pregnancies per Hundred: Josh Guetzkow on CovidVax’ Toll on Expecting (Unsuspecting) Moms

Prof. Josh Guetzkow never planned to investigate vaccines. A sociologist by training, with a background in public health and a Harvard postdoc, he watched the COVID-19 response unfold from Tel Aviv with growing skepticism. The case numbers were ballooning, but so were the tests. “It was absurd and bizarre,” he said. “My Spidey sense lit up.”

He began tracking VAERS reports, then similar data in Europe. The flood of vaccine adverse events pushed him to dig deeper. What emerged was a stark finding: among pregnant women in Israel, the risk of fetal loss surged after mRNA vaccination, especially early in pregnancy.

“Women vaccinated for COVID in the first trimester, weeks 8 to 13, had four additional fetal losses per hundred women,” Guetzkow explained. “Over half of those extra losses occurred after week 19—these are stillbirths.”

That statistic is not theoretical. Israel has strict laws on pregnancy termination. Elective abortion after week 25 is illegal. Even after week 14, it’s rare. “So we know these weren’t choices,” Guetzkow said. “These were deaths.”

The numbers were pulled from Israel’s second-largest HMO, Maccabi, which serves 2.6 million members. By using observed-to-expected statistical models, his team compared outcomes after COVID vaccination to historical baselines, adjusting for age, comorbidities, smoking status, and gestational week. The signal was clear and persistent.

Most safety studies on COVID vaccines in pregnancy stop tracking outcomes at week 19. Guetzkow calls this a fatal flaw. “Many of the other studies cut off observation at week 19,” he said. “That’s where half the signal lies.”

By contrast, pregnant women who received the influenza vaccine during the same time period had fewer pregnancy losses than expected, about five fewer per hundred. That pattern reflects a well-documented phenomenon: the “healthy vaccinee bias.”

“Healthy women are more likely to get vaccinated,” he noted. “That biases most of the safety studies in favor of the vaccine.” Yet even adjusting for that effect, mRNA vaccines showed excess loss.

The results were dose-related. Women who received a third dose during pregnancy—after receiving doses one and two beforehand—showed about half the excess loss of those who received both doses one and two while pregnant. “That suggests a dose-response relationship,” said Guetzkow.

But despite the growing signals, the official response has been muted. “There’s been no acknowledgment from Pfizer or Israel’s public health agencies,” he said. “mRNA shots are still being recommended to pregnant women in Israel—no changes.”

The U.S. and Japan have quietly softened their recommendations. Japan no longer promotes the COVID-19 vaccine for pregnant women. In the U.S., the advice is vague: “Talk to your doctor.” But Guetzkow is blunt: “Doctors follow their boards. And the boards still recommend it.”

He’s careful not to claim causality outright. “We don’t know if the harm is from the spike protein or the lipid nanoparticle,” he admits. “But something is happening.”

And something larger, he suggests, went terribly wrong in how the scientific and medical community approached the problem. “We treat pregnant women extraordinarily carefully in medicine,” he said. “You’re not supposed to eat sushi. You don’t drink wine. You stay away from cat litter. And yet, the precautionary principle got tossed out the window.”

That abandonment of caution, Dr. Bock argues, points to a broader breakdown. “The reason we do almost everything is to create a foundation. We build shelters—for what? For whom? To protect those who are vulnerable.”

Guetzkow’s warning isn’t just retrospective. With mRNA platforms expanding into RSV, flu, and cancer treatments, the implications stretch ahead. “We don’t understand the mechanism of action,” he said. “If we don’t figure this out, we could be repeating the same mistake—again and again.”

The public, meanwhile, has already voted with its feet. “Nobody’s going out to get vaccinated for COVID anymore,” he said. “Very, very few people are getting their boosters.” Asked what he’d print on a warning label, he pauses. Then he replies, “We treated pregnancy like a testing ground. That can’t ever happen again.”

Please read his Observed-to-Expected Fetal Losses Following mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination in Early Pregnancy

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