ISTANBUL, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) -- Turkish physicians on Tuesday continued to urge pregnant women to receive COVID-19 vaccines to protect themselves and their babies.
According to experts, the number of unvaccinated pregnant women diagnosed with COVID-19 is increasing across the country.
Seval Izdes, an intensive care unit specialist at a city hospital in the capital Ankara, said the number of hospital admissions of unvaccinated pregnant women infected with the virus is high. "And they experience the effects of the disease very severely," she was quoted as saying by Hurriyet Daily News.
For Hakan Akelma, an anesthesiology in Turkey's southeastern Diyarbakir province, the Delta variant progresses aggressively among these patients and deteriorates their health conditions rapidly.
Akelma has been urging future mothers repeatedly from his social media accounts to get jabbed as soon as possible.
Specialists argue that some pregnant women avoid getting vaccinated over the fear of harming their babies, but put themselves in a risky situation.
"The results of some recently conducted international scientific studies on the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines among pregnant women are very promising," Ramazan Mercan, a professor of gynecology and obstetrics at an Istanbul-based private hospital, told Xinhua.
He stressed that the data revealed that vaccines are safe and effective for pregnant women and lactating mothers.
Mercan also noted that the resistance among pregnant women to COVID-19 vaccines is slowly decreasing.
The total number of COVID-19 vaccines administered in Turkey has neared 94 million, according to its health ministry.
The figure indicated that 77.2 percent of the eligible population took at least one dose of vaccine, the ministry added. Enditem
