Interviewed April 6, 2021 — Emily: “I had been thinking about getting the COVID vaccines for a very long time, just being a healthcare worker and being pregnant since August. It was going to be a thing I would have to think about. I found a community through social media.
I found a lot of other pregnant healthcare workers who were all in the same situation as me who didn’t have the luxury of time to wait, and we all pretty much came to the same conclusion that it’s a smart idea to get versus getting COVID. We supported each other. I wouldn't say as a whole we felt 100 percent sure about our decision to get the vaccine, but it was enough to go on.”
Matthew: “Emily was in pretty close to one of the first waves of eligibility. I had been following the data really closely for my job. I knew that pregnant women weren’t included in the clinical trials.
When Emily became eligible, she was pretty gung ho, and I was actually the one who wanted to wait just a little bit longer.”
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Bio: Matthew Dudley, PhD, MSPH, is the Co-Director of Epidemiology and the Johns Hopkins Institute for Vaccine Safety, and an Assistant Scientist in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Emily Saneski, BSN, RN-BC, is a nurse in the Psychiatric Emergency Department at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. They live in Baltimore, have two cats, and are expecting our first child to be born on Memorial Day weekend 2021.