SINGAPORE — Pregnant women are at a higher risk of severe complications from Covid-19 that could lead to death, Associate Professor Kenneth Mak from the Ministry of Health (MOH) said on Friday (Sept 24), as he called on them to get vaccinated.

Speaking at a news conference by the Government’s Covid-19 task force, the director of medical services at MOH said that several pregnant women had been among some younger Covid-19 patients admitted to hospital who have not been vaccinated.

“Perhaps, this was because of a concern that the vaccine might affect their ability to get pregnant, or that the vaccine would harm the foetus,” he said. “Real-world data has shown the opposite.”

Pregnant women are at a higher risk of getting a more severe infection from the coronavirus, he stressed.

They are also more susceptible to severe complications of either Covid-19 or the pregnancy and are also at a higher risk of needing intensive care and death, he added.

Assoc Prof Mak’s comments came as the task force announced tightened measures to slow down the unexpectedly rapid rise in cases that has put a strain on Singapore’s healthcare and response system.

The Academy of Medicine Singapore’s College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Obstetrical and Gynecological Society of Singapore have issued strong advice for pregnant women to get vaccinated as soon as possible, he noted.

TODAY reported last week that the Singapore General Hospital was seeing a worrying rise in the number of pregnant women who have Covid-19 being admitted to its isolation wards.

The hospital said then that it had not seen such patients in all of last year and this year until August, and more than 10 cases have been recorded since then. A number of the women needed oxygen support to breathe.

None of these women was fully vaccinated and “very few” were partially vaccinated, the hospital had said.

KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH), the largest hospital specialising in healthcare for women and children in Singapore, told TODAY last week that it has also seen a “recent increase” in the number of pregnant women infected with Covid-19.

From May until mid-August this year, it saw about twice as many such cases. The majority of them were not vaccinated.

In a written parliamentary reply last Monday, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said that the Health Sciences Authority (HSA) has received a small number of non-serious “adverse event” reports with the Pfizer-BioNTech or Comirnaty vaccine in pregnant women.

However, he said that these adverse events are similar to those reported in the general population.

Assoc Prof Mak said on Friday: “Unfortunately, we have already seen some pregnant women in the hospital and in the intensive care units. We do not wish to see many more such cases here.”