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hether it takes weeks, as US Presid ent Donald Trump has hinted, or months, as most healthcare experts expect, an approved vaccine against the coronavirus is coming, and it's hotly anticipated. Still, it will initially be in short supply while manufactur ers scale up production. As the pandemic con tinues to put millions at risk daily, including healthcare workers, older people and those with preexisting diseases, who should get vaccinated first? This week, a strategic advisory group at the World Health Organization (WHO) weighed in with preliminary guidance for global vaccine allocation, identifying groups that should be prioritized. These recommendations join a draft plan from a panel assembled by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), released earlier this month. Experts praise both plans for addressing the historic scale and unique epidemiology of the coronavirus pandemic. And they commend the NASEM for including in their guidance minority racial and ethnic groups-which COVID19 has hit hard-by addressing the

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Y alda Afshar was about two months pregnant when reports of COVID-19 began to emerge in the United States in February last year. As an obstetrician managing high-risk pregnancies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Afshar knew that respiratory viruses are especially dangerous to pregnant women. There was very little data on the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and, as cases racked up, she felt like she was flying blind, both while advising her patients and in navigating her own worries about contracting the virus and passing it on to her baby and family. But her situation also brought her closer to the women she was treating. "I had this sense of solidarity that I've not felt before," she says. "It was an inspiration to just work harder and try to get answers faster." Afshar launched one of the first registries in the United States to track women who had tested positive for the virus during their pregnancy, working with colleagues from across the country to recruit and follow participants. More than a dozen similar projects launched over the course of 2020. Now, more than a year into the pandemic, research from groups around the world has shown that pregnant women with COVID-19 are at higher risk of hospitalization and severe disease than are women of the same age who are not pregnant. The rates of severe illness and death are also higher in pregnant women from certain minority racial and ethnic groups than in those in non-minority groups, mirroring the situation in the wider population. The good news is that babies are mostly spared a severe respiratory infection, and do not often get sick. Samples from the placenta, the umbilical cord and blood from mothers and infants indicate that the virus rarely HOW DOES COVID AFFECT MOTHER AND BABY? Pregnant women fare worse than others, although the risks to the fetus are slight. By Nidhi Subbaraman A pregnant woman attends a celebration in Caracas. Data show that pregnant women face increased risks from SARS-CoV-2 infection.