As soon as Courtney Lynn Koltes arrives home from her first COVID-19 vaccine appointment, she pulls out a breast pump. She had stopped breastfeeding her daughter about two months earlier due to a medical conflict. But she was not off the pills, and recently came across research suggesting that antibodies from a vaccinated mother could be transmitted to her baby through milk.
Making the milk flow again – a process known as relaxation – would not be easy. She planned to pump up every hour from 7 to 23 hours. But Koltes and her husband were eager to finally introduce their four-month-old daughter to family members, and with children not yet eligible, she was willing to give it a try.
“I’m starting to progress very slowly, so it’s worth it if it means I can protect her,” Koltes, who lives in Orange County, California, said last week – nine days after receiving her first dose of Pfizer. BioNTech vaccine.
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Partly because it is so physically stressful, relaxation is not common. (Medicine is often involved as well.) But over the past few weeks, relaxation-focused online forums have been filled with newly vaccinated mothers like Colts. Some had stopped breastfeeding their children more than a year earlier.
“I’m glad I’m not the only one here for this reason!” wrote one woman in a live thread in a private Facebook group.
“Go team vaccination!” another wrote.
In stark contrast, other parenting and breastfeeding forums have smeared concerns that breastfeeding from a newly vaccinated mother could be dangerous. It is not only vaccine skeptics who have encouraged the fears, which researchers say are unfounded; some pediatricians and vaccine administrators request nursing mothers to shed their milk after being vaccinated.
So what is it? Is breast milk from a vaccinated person a type of elixir that can ward off COVID? And if so, do the newly vaccinated mothers sneak breast milk into older children’s grain or do they share their extra milk with babies of friends on something? Or should nursing mothers endure to be vaccinated?
The answer, six researchers agreed, is that mothers who have just been vaccinated feel right as if they have a new superpower. Several studies show that their antibodies generated after vaccination can be transmitted through breast milk. As with so much to do with the coronavirus, more research will be beneficial. But there is no concrete reason for new mothers not to be vaccinated anymore or to shed their breast milk.
Do ‘vaccinated breast milk’ contain antibodies?
Yes, study after study shows that it contains antibodies. Exactly how these antibodies protect the baby against COVID is not yet clear.
According to UNICEF, approximately 116 million babies were born worldwide in the first nine months of the pandemic. This prompted researchers to scramble to answer a critical question: can the virus be transmitted through breast milk? Some people have assumed it can. But because several groups of researchers tested the milk, they found no traces of viruses, only antibodies, suggesting that drinking the milk could protect babies from infections.
The next big question for breast milk researchers was whether the protective benefits of a COVID vaccine could be similarly transmitted to infants. None of the vaccination trials included pregnant or breastfeeding women, so researchers had to find lactating women who qualified for the first vaccination.
Through a Facebook group, Rebecca Powell, a human milk immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine in Mount Sinai, Manhattan, found that hundreds of doctors and nurses were willing to share their breast milk from time to time. In her most recent study, which was not formally published, she analyzed the milk of six women who received the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, and four who received the Moderna vaccine, 14 days after the women received their second shots. has. She found significant numbers of one specific antibody, called IgG, in all of them. Other researchers have had similar results.
“There is reason to be excited,” said Dr. Kathryn Gray, a medical specialist for fetal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said she has done similar studies. “We assume it can provide some protection.”
But how do we know for sure? One way to test this – to expose babies to the virus – is, of course, unethical. Instead, some researchers tried to answer the question by studying the properties of the antibodies. Neutralize it, which means that it prevents the virus from infecting human cells?
In a draft of a small study, one Israeli researcher found that this was so. “Breast milk can prevent the spread of viruses and the ability of the virus to infect host cells that cause disease,” Yariv Wine, an applied immunologist at Tel Aviv University, wrote in an email.
Research is too early for vaccinated mothers who are breastfeeding to act as if their babies could not become infected, said Dr. Kirsi Jarvinen-Seppo, head of pediatric allergy and immunology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, said. Jarvinen-Seppo conducted similar studies. “There is no direct evidence that the COVID antibodies in breast milk protect the baby, only evidence to suggest that this may be the case,” she said.
How long can protection last?
As long as the baby is taking the antibody-containing breast milk.
Destiny Burgess’ twins were born prematurely. Burgess and her husband are back at work in Asheville, North Carolina. One of their older children is in kindergarten. Two are in day care. All this worries Burgess about her babies who are now 3 months old.
When a vaccinated friend offered to share some of her milk with the twins, she accepted.
“I feel like I have this newfound superpower,” said friend Olivia de Soria. Besides feeding her own 4-month-old and sneaking some of her milk into her 3-year-old’s chocolate milk, de Soria now shares her milk with five other families.
“They can’t get the chance, so it gives me some peace of mind,” Burgess said. She does wonder how much “vaccinated milk” would be needed to make a dive.
The unsatisfactory answer is that it is not clear. What researchers agree on is that a baby who ingests breast milk all day is more likely to be protected than someone who only gets an occasional drop. But no one mocks the idea of giving a little to older children when it is not difficult.
They also agree that the protective benefits of breast milk work more like a pill you have to take every day than a shot that lasts a decade. This short-term defense – known as ‘passive protection’ – can only last for hours or days from the baby’s last ‘dose’, Powell said.
“It is not the same as vaccinating the baby,” she added.
This means ‘once you stop breastfeeding, there is no protection’, says Antti Seppo, another researcher on breast milk at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Seppo also found that the antibodies appeared in the milk about two weeks after the first shot and that it peaked after the second shot.
How do we know that ‘vaccinated breast milk’ is safe?
Researchers say they know enough about the way vaccines generally affect breast milk so they don’t have to worry about it.
Several researchers involved in research on breast milk and the COVID vaccine raised the same opinion. “There is no reason to think that there is anything to this vaccine that could cause it, and there is reason to believe that it will be beneficial,” Christina Chambers, co-director of the Center for Better Beginnings, told the University of California, said. , San Diego.
Why then follow parenting forums full of anecdotes about pediatricians telling mothers to wait to be vaccinated until their baby is older or to dump their milk after vaccination? Mostly because lactating mothers were not included in vaccine trials, researchers could not concretely study the risks.
But the researchers’ confidence that mothers vaccinated by COVID-19 are safe comes from what is widely known about how vaccines work.
“Unlike pregnancy, where there are theoretical safety issues, there is really no concern about lactation and vaccination,” Gray said.
Both the Moderna and the Pfizer BioNTech products are mRNA vaccines. “The ingredients in the vaccine are mRNA molecules that have a short lifespan and have no way of switching to milk,” Seppo said.
So is relaxation really worth it?
Maybe not, decides one initial enthusiastic mother.
Nearly two weeks later, Koltes managed to pump only a few drops of breast milk each session. An email exchange with her pediatrician reinforced that she could not be sure, even though she had the milk going, that it was safe to keep unmasked, unvaccinated family members to hold her daughter. She applauded other women achieving more success with relaxation. But for her, that was it.
“It feels like a weight is being lifted,” she said as she ended her strict pumping schedule. Now she just has to wait for a real vaccine for her daughter, she said. Both Pfizer and Moderna recently began testing their vaccines on babies as young as 6 months old.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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