If mother was vaccinated, newborns got protection – small study by JAMA

Further strengthening the critical need for vaccination, a small study has found that six-month-old babies have antibodies, if their mothers had got vaccinated while they were pregnant.

The study published on Monday (February 7) in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), a peer-reviewed medical journal, found that at six months of age, babies born to mothers vaccinated against COVID-19 during pregnancy are more likely to have antibodies against the virus in their blood than babies born to unvaccinated mothers who were infected while pregnant.

“Twenty-eight sixmonth-old infants of mRNA-vaccinated moms have antibodies for COVID-19. These mothers were vaccinated with two doses of an mRNA vaccine at 20 to 32 weeks' gestation when the transfer of maternal antibodies to the fetus via the placenta is at its highest,” the study stated.

It added: “The antibody levels were compared with 12 babies of that age whose mothers were infected during that same time frame. They found detectable levels of immunoglobulin G (IgG), the most common antibody in blood, in 57% of babies born to vaccinated mothers but in only 8% of the babies of infected, unvaccinated mothers.”