I am a lawyer but I am not YOUR lawyer. If you are a healthcare provider (HCP), I will not help you appeal your denied request for medical exemption from the COVID vaccine obligation your hospital employer has required.
And I sure as heck won’t do it because the FDA has said that “Clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccines currently used in the United States did not include people who are breastfeeding.”
That is because clinical trials are almost NEVER done for ANY drugs/vaccines on pregnant and lactating women [the FDA demographic descriptor]. Most of the pharmaceuticals (over-the-counter or prescription) in any household were not tested on pregnant or lactating people. At. All.
Wanna know what else wasn’t tested on typical-female-body-type models? Car crash test dummies. You can bet I wear a seat belt each and every time I get in a car. Because I know that NOT wearing a seat belt will be far more injurious in a crash. I don’t need to wait until they build a crash test dummy that is sized like me to convince me to wear a seat belt today.
But back to meds and vaccines. Lactating parents are left to cobble together information to assess the benefits-risks of the use of any pharmaceutical, especially those new on the market. Yes, Yes I know about Tom Hale’s Medications and Mother’s Milk, and LactMed data base at the National Institute of Medicine, and e-lactancia with similar data offered in Spanish and English (yippee!). But those experts are themselves cobbling together research from reported impacts and hypothecated risks of the entry of various drugs into human milk, and its subsequent ingestion by babies. They are not doing the research on the drugs — they are evaluating research on drugs that have already been approved.
The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has identified the dire need for clinical trial data for all drugs, with pregnant and lactating people in the trials.
Still COVID vaccine hesitant? While you ponder the imagined and unstudied risk for a lactating person to take the COVID vaccine (because this demographic wasn’t in any clinical trial), weigh it against the hard core verifiable data showing the grave health and mortality risks to any lactating, recently-pregnant person, if you actually acquire COVID. The situation is so grave that the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a 29 Sept 2021 “urgent health advisory to increase COVID-19 vaccination among people who are pregnant, recently pregnant (including those who are lactating), who are trying to become pregnant now, or who might become pregnant in the future to prevent serious illness, deaths, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.”
Weigh whether the virus, which can turn into dreaded “long COVID,” is something a new parent and their family can endure if they lose the health insurance coverage that comes with a job that is requiring vaccination.
Weigh it against the risks when you have received all the many other required vaccines that health care providers must annually show to keep their jobs treating sick people.
Ponder how a human milk-feeding baby receives great and long-lasting antibody protection through human milk of a vaccinated parent (see here, too). The baby gets bolstered immunity protection via the milk … especially important as the child cannot receive the COVID vaccine directly. And the protection provided via milk lasts longer if the parent was vaccinated, than if the parent caught (and survived) COVID.
Just. Do. It.
Besides me, the CDC, and the FDA, all these folks want you to do it, too:
World Health Organization, teaming up with UNICEF, the Infant Feeding in Emergencies Core Group, and the COVID-19 Infant Feeding Working Group (August 2021)
U. S. Food and Drug Administration (7 Oct 2021)
U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (7 Oct 2021)
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (10 Oct 2021)
The editors of the esteemed Journal of the American Medical Association (8 Feb 2021)
The American Academy of Pediatrics (both for children, as vaccines are approved for younger ages, and for adolescent pregnant and lactating people) (2 Feb 2021)