Whooping Cough Vaccine in Pregnancy

From 16 weeks, and most women have it at around 20 weeks — often arranged around the mid-pregnancy scan. The aim is to be vaccinated before 32 weeks, giving your antibodies the most time to build and cross the placenta (NHS). Past 32 weeks it is still worth having: protection is reduced, not absent.

No study has found evidence that it does, and this question has been examined hard. The UK regulator's study of 20,074 vaccinated pregnant women found no increased risk of stillbirth and no increase in any of an extensive predefined list of pregnancy complications (Donegan et al., BMJ 2014). UKHSA's summary after more than a decade of use: very safe for you and your baby.

No — not as a matter of probability but of biology. Every component is inactivated; there is nothing in it that can multiply or infect (UKHSA). It cannot cause whooping cough, diphtheria or tetanus in you or your baby.

No. Before 32 weeks is the ideal, but the vaccine can be given right up to birth — it may simply be less effective if given very close to delivery, because there is less time for antibodies to transfer (UKHSA). You can even have it up to 8 weeks after your baby is born: at that stage it protects you, reducing the chance of you passing the infection on.

Yes. Antibody levels from a previous dose — or from having had whooping cough itself — fade, and are unlikely to give your next baby enough protection. A booster in each pregnancy raises your antibody levels at exactly the time your baby can collect them across the placenta (UKHSA).

Consistently around 90%. The programme's first three years measured 91% (95% CI 88–94%) against confirmed whooping cough in babies under 3 months where the mother was vaccinated at least a week before delivery (Amirthalingam et al., 2016); UKHSA's latest estimate against confirmed infant disease is 89% (95% CI 86–91%), and around 91% against infant death. No vaccine reaches 100% — but vaccinated mothers' babies who do catch it tend to get it less severely (UKHSA).

Yes. The flu vaccine can be given at the same appointment from 16 weeks — though UKHSA advises against delaying the whooping cough jab just to combine them. The RSV vaccine, offered from around your 28-week appointment, can also be given at the same time (NHS). In practice whooping cough usually comes first, around 20 weeks, with RSV following at 28.

Not adequately. UKHSA is unambiguous: breastfeeding cannot provide enough protection against whooping cough, even if you were vaccinated or had the disease in the past. What reaches a newborn in useful quantity is antibody transferred across the placenta before birth — which is what the jab in pregnancy maximises.

Whooping cough runs in cycles, peaking every 3 to 5 years in the UK, and the 2023–24 wave was exceptional: 14,879 confirmed cases in England in 2024 against 857 in 2023, with 433 in babies under 3 months — the largest outbreak since enhanced surveillance began in 1994 (UKHSA). Not a reason for panic, but a concrete demonstration of what the vaccine is for: most babies who have died of whooping cough since 2012 were born to unvaccinated mothers.

Not as a substitute. UKHSA's answer to "is there another way to protect my baby?" is blunt: there is no other effective way — vaccinating the adults around a newborn does not give the baby antibodies, whereas vaccination in pregnancy does. If adults in your household want a booster for their own protection, contact us and we can advise.