Johnson, Carrie expecting second child

LONDON: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie are expecting a second baby, British media reported on Saturday.

Their first child, Wilfred, was born in April last year. Newspapers said Carrie told friends in a post on social media app Instagram that she felt “incredibly blessed” to be pregnant again.

She also said she suffered a miscarriage at the beginning of the year.

“Fertility issues can be really hard for many people, particularly when on plaforms like Instagram it can look like everything is only ever going well,” she was quoted as saying.

“I found it a real comfort to hear from people who had also experienced loss so I hope that in some very small way sharing this might help others too.”

The couple married in May this year. The prime minister, who is 57, has been married twice before and declines to say how many children he has fathered. He had four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, a lawyer.

Carrie, 33, is due to give birth in December, media said.

Meanwhile, British health authorities have urged more pregnant women to get coronavirus jabs ater a national study found the Delta variant appeared to increase their risk of severe symptoms.

Jacqueline Dunkley-bent, chief midwifery officer for England, wrote to GPS and midwives on Friday urging them to encourage expectant mothers to get a jab as new data showed an increase in severe illness among those hospitalised with virus symptoms.

She said she was calling on pregnant women to “protect themselves and their babies.”

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) and the Royal College of Midwives have also recommended vaccination of pregnant women.

Public Health England has said it recommends pregnant women get Moderna and Pfizer vaccines because they have been given to over 130,000 pregnant women in the United States.

A paper based on national data compiled by the UK Obstetric Surveillance System, published online on July 25, found that the proportion of pregnant women admited to hospital with moderate to severe infection rose “significantly” ater the Delta variant became dominant in May.

The paper by University of Oxford researchers found that pregnant women hospitalised during the Delta wave were more likely to get pneumonia, with a third requiring respiratory support.