Covid-19: Pregnant women urged to get the jab after mum's death

Pregnant women are being urged to get vaccinated after a Londonderry mother died with Covid-19 two weeks after giving birth.

Samantha Willis was laid to rest on Monday. During the service her baby daughter, Evie Grace, was baptised.

Dr David Farren, an infection control doctor, said hospitals were now "constantly" seeing pregnant women with Covid.

"Enough's enough. Pregnant women need to get their vaccine," he said.

Speaking to BBC News NI's Good Morning Ulster programme, Dr Farren said: "This is something we are seeing constantly at the moment, we are seeing pregnant women coming in with Covid-19, into hospitals.

"Now the majority do well but we do see occasionally people ending up intensive care, having to have their babies delivered early and last week we saw a tragic death."

Dr Farren, who is also a microbiologist and the deputy chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) NI's consultants' committee, said he could understand the hesitancy of pregnant women to get vaccinated because there had been "mixed messages".

"At the very beginning when they had the vaccine effectiveness trials they hadn't enrolled enough pregnant women for the JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) to decide that it was safe in pregnant women.

"Since then there have been literally hundreds of thousands of pregnant women given the vaccine worldwide and JCVI came out in August this year categorically stating that the vaccine was safe in pregnant women."

He added: "People need to start trusting their doctors, their midwives, their nurses and not listening to people who have spent not people who have spent 30 minutes on the internet and decided it's not safe."

On Monday, an unvaccinated woman told BBC Radio Ulster's The Nolan Show that she was admitted to intensive care with Covid-19 while pregnant with her second child.

"It is almost as though someone is stopping you from breathing," said Sophie McMillan.

"I was fully unvaccinated, that was a choice I'd made. With hindsight I probably regret the choice now.

"The worst moment was probably the realisation that this could go badly wrong - if I don't turn a corner, if the CPAC mask doesn't work, if the steroids don't work, we are talking about ventilation.

"By the time I left there was about 10 other people, all ventilated. I was the only one conscious."