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COVID-19 Recovery Committee 20 January 2022

20 Jan 2022 · S6 · COVID-19 Recovery Committee

Item of business

Ministerial Statement, Coronavirus Acts Report and Subordinate Legislation

Health Protection (Coronavirus) (Requirements) (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2022 (SSI 2022/6)

Professor Leitch Watch on SPTV

The third question is the easiest. There will be no disadvantage to couples whose IVF treatment has had to be paused. There will be an extension of the time and, if necessary, an extension of the cycle, depending on where they were in the cycle when the clinically based decision was made. It was awkward timing, of course. The timing of clinical decisions is often awkward, because clinical decisions do not know the calendar. It was completely risk based. The decision was about the safety of women and babies, and it was not made lightly. It was a very hard decision because of the nature of the disease and, in particular, what it does to high-risk individuals—who, I am afraid, include pregnant women, whether or not they have had IVF. People in those individual cases should be having conversations with their care teams in fertility units around the country, whether those are public or private. I have been having some of that conversation at a national level, in both the media and stakeholder groups, but I cannot have individual conversations with each couple and doing so would be inappropriate. Those individual conversations should be taking place with case leaders, who certainly have the information, because the advice came from many of those clinicians. Ms Baillie’s second question, which was about when we will restart treatment, is the hardest. It is not about case rates; it is about the risk of Covid if you are pregnant. That risk will remain whatever the case rate is. The way to restart is to get vaccinated. We know that vaccinated pregnant women are much safer than unvaccinated pregnant women. You made a point about the advice on vaccination at the very beginning of the pandemic. That advice lasted literally a few weeks. It was all about the fact that we had not vaccinated pregnant women so the research could not be done. We could not say what people should do if they were pregnant because we had not vaccinated pregnant women in the research trials. While we did the rest of the research on pregnant women and kidney transplant patients, it was a precautionary measure to tell pregnant women not to have their vaccines at that point. However, as soon as the trials with pregnant women were done and it was proved to be safe, we told pregnant women to get their vaccines. I understand why that might be confusing to some people, but pregnant women have now been vaccinated safely in their hundreds of thousands around the world, and that is what we have been doing in Scotland for a long time. The way to restart IVF is to get vaccinated.

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COVID-19 Recovery Committee 20 January 2022

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