Doctors report a baby girl in Florida was born with the antibodies to fight COVID-19 thanks to her mom.
Let’s connect the dots.
A new study says the Florida mother is a frontline healthcare worker who received her first dose of the Moderna vaccine when she was 36 weeks pregnant. She gave birth three weeks later to a healthy baby with COVID-19 antibodies.
Doctors believe the mother passed on those antibodies through the placenta, but more research needs to be done.
The idea of a mom passing on protections to her baby is not new.
Starting in the second trimester, a pregnant woman starts passing important disease-fighting molecules onto her fetus. This ramps up as the pregnancy goes on and is critical to helping newborns fight off infections.
These maternal antibodies help protect babies until their own immune system matures and they are old enough to be vaccinated themselves.
Pregnant women were not in the original trials for the Moderna and Pfizer coronavirus vaccines, a common practice in these studies. But Pfizer has announced a large-scale trial with expectant mothers and Moderna has created a registry to track how pregnant women respond to the vaccine.