The National Institutes of Health (NIH) says mothers and their newborns can benefit from COVID-19 vaccine boosters given during pregnancy after a study showed significantly higher antibody levels in the cord blood of babies born to women who received a booster during pregnancy compared with those who only received the two-dose primary series.
Yet the study cited had some major limitations. It used monovalent COVID-19 vaccines that are no longer available in the United States, did not assess the effectiveness of the vaccine against currently dominant COVID-19 variants, did not provide safety data for a third vaccine dose, and determined the vaccine would be protective based on neutralizing antibody levels alone.
