Josh Guetzkow, Retsef Levi et al. hammer home risks of COVID-19 injections to pregnant women

Particularly in gestational weeks 8-13... color me shocked

A new preprint was uploaded on June 20, 2025 to the medRXiv preprint server entitled: “Observed-to-Expected Fetal Losses Following mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination in Early Pregnancy”.¹ Among the authors are my friends and colleagues Josh Guetzkow and Retsef Levi - we have all been saying this for years.

The study investigates the association between mRNA COVID-19 injection (primarily Pfizer products) during early pregnancy and fetal loss rates in Israel. As if we don’t have enough to worry about. *It is important to remember that pregnant women were excluded from initial COVID-19 injection clinical trials.

The study addresses the limited safety data for injection in early pregnancy, particularly gestational weeks 8-13, when teratogenicity risks are highest.

As they point out in the preprint, existing observational studies face methodological challenges, such as healthy vaccinee bias, so the authors used an observed-to-expected fetal loss analysis. This means that they statistically-determined whether the number of fetal losses (including spontaneous abortions, induced abortions, and stillbirths) in a specific group - such as pregnant women injected with mRNA COVID-19 injectable products during early pregnancy - differed from what would be expected based on historical data.

They used data from Israeli Maccabi Healthcare Services (MHS), covering 226,395 pregnancies from 2016 to 2022 to assess whether injection (with Pfizer’s BNT162b2 injectable product) was linked to higher-than-expected fetal losses. It was.

They analyzed pregnancies in women where their last menstrual periods were between March 1, 2016, and February 28, 2022, using MHS’s electronic health record database, and compared observed fetal losses to expected losses in cohorts injected with COVID-19 injectable product doses 1 or 3 during the gestational weeks 8-13 and 14-27. Lo-and-behold, they actually had a control group that included women vaccinated for influenza during the same gestational periods or injected for COVID-19 or influenza before pregnancy. Expected fetal loss rates were derived from a logistic regression model trained on data spanning 2016-2018, adjusting for individual risk factors like maternal age, co-morbidities, and socioeconomic status. The analysis excluded pregnancies that occurred prior to week 8 due to inconsistent documentation, and focused on late fetal losses (after weeks 14, 20, and 25) to address potential biases from elective abortions.

What they found

It is provably clear: COVID-19 injection during gestational weeks 8-13 is associated with higher-than-expected fetal losses. Color me shocked. For dose 1, there were approximately 3.85 additional fetal losses per 100 pregnancies (95% CI: 2.55-5.14), and for dose 3, 1.90 additional losses (95% CI: 0.39-3.42), with most excess losses occurring after week 20. That is significant. In contrast, injection during weeks 14-27 showed lower-than-expected fetal losses. Influenza vaccination during weeks 8-27 consistently resulted in fewer fetal losses than expected, which is likely due to healthy vaccinee bias.

N.B. In case you don’t know, the healthy vaccinee bias is when healthier people get vaccinated, making vaccines seem safer in studies because these people already have better health outcomes.

Women injected in the context of COVID-19 or influenza before pregnancy had fetal loss rates at or below expected levels. Late fetal loss analysis confirmed persistent excess losses for COVID-19 injection in weeks 8-13, with 1.66 and 0.95 additional losses per 100 pregnancies for doses 1 and 3, respectively, by week 25.

They indeed conducted study robustness checks, including re-estimating the baseline model with data from 2016–2019 and adjusting the follow-up start to week 10, which yielded consistent results. Influenza vaccination cohorts from 2018-2019 also showed lower-than-expected fetal losses, supporting the model’s reliability. Comparisons of covariate distributions between COVID-19 and influenza vaccination cohorts revealed slight differences, which were adjusted for in the analysis. The study also examined SARS-CoV-2 infections, finding no significant increase in fetal losses, though unvaccinated women infected in weeks 8-13 had slightly higher-than-expected losses. This is explained by the notorious spike protein, in my opinion.

The authors concluded that mRNA COVID-19 injection during the gestational weeks 8-13 is associated with a significantly higher-than-expected number of fetal losses, particularly after week 20, highlighting safety concerns in early pregnancy. The lower-than-expected losses for influenza vaccination also highlight the influence of healthy vaccinee bias, which importantly, may mask risks in other studies.

The trolls will shout “preprint” of course, but this study is very hard to refute especially in the context of anomalously large signals in multiple pharmacovigilance databases world-wide. Anyone who does peer-review this study will not have many issues with the analysis as it is sound.

Additional reading:

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and this:

1. Josh Guetzkow, Tal Patalon, Sivan Gazit, Tracy Beth Hoeg, Joseph Fraiman, Yaakov Segal, Retsef Levi. Observed-to-Expected Fetal Losses Following mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination in Early Pregnancy. medRxiv 2025.06.18.25329352; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.18.25329352