The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend the tetanus and diphtheria toxoids and acellular pertussis (Tdap) vaccine for postpartum women before they are discharged from the hospital, supposedly on the grounds that children can catch pertussis from their mothers.
New research, however, found that doing this actually has no protective effect for the infants. An examination of more than 500 infants with pertussis found little difference in the incidence of the disease between those whose mothers had been given the vaccine and those whose mothers had not been given the vaccine.
According to the study, as reprinted on the website Green Med Info:
“[I]mmunizing ... postpartum mothers with Tdap vaccine did not reduce pertussis illness in infants”.