SCIENCE science.org 21 JANUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6578 253
to join Horizon Europe (Science, 8 January
2021, p. 110), the Commission has delayed ap-
proval over a separate dispute about border
issues with Northern Ireland. ERC warned
U.K.-based starting-grant winners that, like
the Switzerland-based awardees, they may
have to move elsewhere to receive their
award if the Horizon Europe deal fails.
In that case, the government would pro-
vide backup funding for ERC starting-grant
winners who stay in the country, as well as
a wider alternative funding scheme—a “bold
and ambitious offer that delivers many of the
benefits of Horizon association,” U.K. science
minister George Freeman announced in No-
vember 2021.
For now, U.K.-based awardees, who are
expected to sign their grant contracts by
April, don’t know whether their funding
will come from ERC or from the U.K. gov-
ernment. Seven U.K.-based winners con-
tacted by Science said they don’t plan to
relocate their lab to the EU in the short
term, but some said they may move in the
future if the uncertainty drags on. “If an in-
stitution told me, ‘You can keep this fund-
ing if you come to Europe,’ I would very
seriously start considering that possibil-
ity,” says Marcelo Lozada-Hidalgo, a physi-
cist at the University of Manchester whose
ERC starting grant is to develop nano-
scale sieves to separate molecules.
Many U.K. researchers are frustrated:
They must wait while other ERC winners
can begin to collect their money and get
started buying equipment and hiring
graduate students. “It feels like our careers
and our ability to do the kind of research
that we’re hoping to do is at the mercy of
the post-Brexit climate, and it’s not some-
thing that we can have any control over,”
says David Doyle, a social psychologist at
the University of Exeter who has an ERC
grant to study the psychosocial outcomes
of people undergoing hormone therapy to
match their gender identity.
The national funding scheme that
Freeman promised is small comfort, some
say. The idea that it could match the col-
laborative opportunities of Horizon Europe
is “pie-in-the-sky nonsense,” says James
Wilsdon, a science policy researcher at the
University of Sheffield. “You can’t replicate
those unilaterally as a single nation,” he says.
Kieron Flanagan, who studies science
and technology policy at Manchester, is
optimistic for a breakthrough on the U.K.-
European impasse on research, but says it
may take years. “The question is, how much
damage gets done in the meantime?” j
Giorgia Guglielmi is a journalist in Basel, Switzerland,
who does part-time communications work for the
Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research.
Studies reveal dangers of SARS-
CoV-2 infection in pregnancy
COVID-T
wo studies last week delivered sobering
news about the dangers of COVID-
to unvaccinated pregnant women and
their babies. Perhaps the most disturb-
ing data came from a first-of-its-kind
analysis that tracked all the tens of
thousands of recent pregnancies in Scotland.
It found that unvaccinated women who be-
came infected with the coronavirus during
pregnancy were far more likely than the gen-
eral pregnant population to have a stillborn
infant or one that dies in the first month of
life. All of the infected women who lost their
fetuses or infants were unvaccinated.
The unvaccinated mothers themselves
were also more endangered: Among
104 pregnant women with a SARS-CoV-
infection who required critical
care, 102 were unvaccinated.
Unvaccinated women also had
a far higher rate of hospitaliza-
tion than their vaccinated coun-
terparts in the study of nearly
88,000 pregnant women.
Yet the study found that in
October 2021, months after
COVID-19 vaccines became widely available
in the United Kingdom, fewer than one-third
of pregnant Scots delivering babies had been
fully vaccinated. Given that more than 77%
of adult women of childbearing age in the
general Scottish population were vaccinated
by then, the result highlights a large vaccine
hesitancy among the pregnant that is mir-
rored in many places. “This should shake us
up and really be a call to action,” says Yalda
Afshar, a high-risk obstetrician at Ronald
Reagan UCLA Medical Center. “Vaccination
is the clear action item to improve health for
pregnant people and their babies.”
Using data from an ongoing Scottish popu-
lation study, researchers at the University of
Edinburgh and colleagues elsewhere tracked
pregnant women between December 2020
and October 2021. Although the risk of poor
outcomes was generally elevated for unvac-
cinated pregnant women who got COVID-
at any point during gestation, it was starkly
higher for those infected late in pregnancy,
the group reports in Nature Medicine. In the
620 mothers who contracted COVID-19 in
the 28 days before they delivered their babies,the study recorded 14 fetal or infant deaths,
10 of them stillbirths. That amounts to
22.5 deaths per 1000 births, compared with
5.6 among all Scottish pregnancies from
March 2020 through October 2021.
The Scottish pregnancy study also high-
lighted risks to the unvaccinated women’s
own health: Ninety-eight percent of critical
care admissions for study participants with
SARS-CoV-2 infection and 91% of hospital-
izations were in unvaccinated women. A
pregnant woman critically ill with COVID-
“should be an anomaly [and] not a daily oc-
currence,” says study first author Sarah Stock,
a maternal and fetal medicine specialist at
the University of Edinburgh.
Many pregnant women have been reluc-
tant to get COVID-19 vaccines, with some
wary of possible harm to their babies. Stock
and colleagues examined birth
outcomes in the more than
18,000 Scots who were vacci-
nated during their pregnancies.
Vaccination during pregnancy,
including receiving a shot within
28 days of giving birth, did
not increase preterm births or
deaths of infants in the weeks
before and after birth.
That finding “is really important” and con-
firms other recent studies, says Sarah Mulkey,
who studies congenital viral infections at
Children’s National Hospital.
The second study, published in The Lancet
Digital Health, examined electronic health
records from more than 18,000 pregnant
women in five U.S. states who were tested
for COVID-19 between March 2020 and Feb-
ruary 2021. The analysis matched 882 un-
vaccinated women who had a confirmed in-
fection and mild to moderate symptoms with
other pregnant women who tested negative,
finding that infected women were signifi-
cantly more likely to have preterm births or
stillborn infants.
The timing of an infection, but not
symptom severity, matters. The earlier in
pregnancy a mother was infected with SARS-
CoV-2, the earlier a baby was likely to be born,
reported study first author Samantha Piekos
of the Institute for Systems Biology and her
colleagues. “Even mild COVID-19 infections
put pregnant people at increased risk for pre-
term delivery,” Piekos says. jBy Meredith Wadman“This should
shake us up ...”
Yalda Afshar,
Ronald Reagan UCLA
Medical CenterVaccination helps prevent stillbirths, critical care