The message from health chiefs is clear: Covid-19 vaccines are safe for pregnant women.

And there is even evidence that vaccinating women now may have knock-on benefits for any children they have in the future, too.

Other studies suggest this is likely to be higher – the results of a poll of more than 1,000 pregnant women, reported last week, showed at least one in three weren’t sure they’d have one.

While a question mark hung over whether Covid-19 vaccines are safe for pregnant women earlier on in jab trials, today there is clear data to show there is no risk to mothers-to-be or their unborn children.

Yet scientists remain adamant there is no evidence to suggest any of the Covid vaccines have any effect on pregnancy.

In November, Pfizer became the first company to announce that its vaccine was effective against Covid-19 – but the company also said it hadn’t yet been tested on pregnant women.

This is entirely normal for vaccine trials, says Dr O’Brien, adding: ‘Traditionally, pregnant women are excluded from these studies as a precaution.’.

There is even evidence that vaccinating women now may have knock-on benefits for any children they have in the future, too (file photo).

Professor Adam Finn, a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), the advisory group which guided the UK’s vaccine rollout, says there were concerns that approving any vaccine before there was clear evidence of safety would put off pregnant women.

He says: ‘Everything that we know about vaccines pointed to these ones being safe for pregnant women, but that’s not enough to go on, you need data.

We had to come up with evidence which showed the vaccines were safe for mother and baby.

It had tracked the condition of more than 90,000 pregnant women who had received a vaccine, the majority of them in their third trimester.

Since then, the number of pregnant American women who have had a vaccine has risen to more than 105,000.

Scientists remain adamant there is no evidence to suggest any of the Covid vaccines have any effect on pregnancy (file photo)

It’s hard to know where it’s come from, because there is absolutely no evidence to suggest these vaccines would affect fertility.’

Scientists point out that there is no biologically plausible mechanism by which vaccines, for Covid or for any other disease, could lead to infertility and there has never been any evidence of vaccines in the UK causing infertility