Molly Siegel had long awaited a COVID-19 vaccine. As an obstetrician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, she regularly saw pregnant people with COVID-19, and knew that the vaccine was the best way to protect herself, her family and others in her workplace. But with a seven-month-old baby at home who was still breastfeeding, she felt hesitant.
Understandably so. Following established norms for clinical trials, pregnant and breastfeeding people were not included in any of the trials for COVID-19 vaccines. So, as health systems around the world began to vaccinate eligible adults, scores of lactating people were left to make their decision in the dark.
“I certainly was frustrated that there weren’t studies on the vaccine in pregnant and lactating women — that as a group, they were excluded from the research,” Siegel says. “It made it really hard to know, as both the patient and the provider, how to think about the vaccine.”
Still, Siegel could not see any plausible risk to her breast milk (she knew that COVID-19 vaccines contain no live virus, for instance), and focused on the benefit of protecting herself and everyone around her. So she got the shot. Then, she donated samples of her breast milk to researchers who would analyse its contents in one of the first such studies.
Now, thanks to Siegel and other participants, scientists are beginning to understand the effects of COVID-19 vaccines on breast milk, and their preliminary results should come as welcome news to the more than 100 million lactating people across the world.
More at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01680-x
