Vaccinated moms trying to give babies antibodies via breast milk

PanARMENIAN.Net - As soon as Courtney Lynn Koltes returned home from her first Covid-19 vaccine appointment, she pulled out a breast pump. She had quit breastfeeding her daughter about two months earlier because of a medication conflict. But she was off those pills, and she had recently stumbled across research suggesting that antibodies from a vaccinated mother could be passed to her baby through milk, The New York Times says in an article.

Getting the milk flowing again — a process known as relactation — would not be easy. Partly because it’s so physically taxing, relactation is not common. (Medication is often also involved.) But over the past few weeks, online forums focused on relactation have been swarmed with newly vaccinated mothers like Koltes. Some had stopped breastfeeding their children more than a year earlier.

In stark contrast, other parenting and breastfeeding forums have been simmering with worries that breast milk from a newly vaccinated mother could be dangerous. It’s not only vaccine skeptics who have been encouraging those fears, which researchers say are unfounded: Some pediatricians and vaccine administrators have been urging nursing mothers to dump their milk after they are vaccinated.

So which is it? Is breast milk from a vaccinated person a sort of elixir capable of staving off Covid? And if so, are the newly vaccinated mothers sneaking breast milk into older children’s cereal or sharing their extra milk with friends’ babies onto something? Or should nursing mothers hold off on getting vaccinated?

The answer, six researchers agreed, is that newly vaccinated mothers are right to feel as if they have a new superpower. Multiple studies show that their antibodies generated after vaccination can, indeed, be passed through breast milk. As with so much to do with the coronavirus, more research would be beneficial. But there is no concrete reason for new mothers to hold off on getting vaccinated or to dump out their breast milk, they said.