The little girl was born in late January and is said to be the first baby to be born with COVID-19 antibodies, according to doctors.
A baby girl born recently in Florida would be the first in the world to be born with COVID-19 antibodies after her mother received the COVID-19 vaccine while pregnant according to Palm Beach County pediatricians, Dr. Paul Gilbert and Dr. Chad Rudnick.
“To our knowledge, this was the first in the world that was reported of a baby being born with antibodies after a vaccination,” Gilbert recently told WPBF.
The baby’s mother, a local front-line healthcare worker, received the first dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine while being 36 weeks pregnant. The little girl was born just three weeks later in late January. Doctors then took a blood sample and tested the baby’s cord in search of antibodies and the results came out positive.
“We tested the baby’s cord to see if the antibodies in the mother passed to the baby which is something, we see happen with other vaccines given during pregnancy,” Gilbert said.
Drs. Gilbert and Rudnik recently published their findings on medRxiv, a website for unpublished research manuscripts that have not been peer-reviewed, and said there remained some factors that indicated that newborns born to vaccinated mothers could still be at risk for COVID-19.
“Further studies have to determine how long will this protection last. They have to determine at what level of protection or how many antibodies does a baby need to have circulating in order to give them protection,” Rudnick said.
Another study carried out earlier in February by researchers from the Israeli Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem showed similar results after the team detected antibodies in all 20 women and in their babies through placental transfer. The study does not clarify wether these tests were carried out while the babies were still in utero, leading to think Palm Beach County’s unidentified baby girl could have been the first one in the world to be born with such antibodies.
While further studies will be needed to determine how long the protection lasts, this finding is key in the fight to protect children from COVID-19. “This is one small case in what will be thousands and thousands of babies born to mothers who have been vaccinated of the next several months,” Rudnick said.
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