No evidence you shouldn’t breastfeed after Covid-19 vaccination
14 October 2021
What was claimed
Vaccines are incompatible with human life, and being vaccinated while pregnant or breastfeeding may be unsafe.
Our verdict
Incorrect. Being vaccinated while pregnant or breastfeeding is recommended as safe.
A post on Instagram shows screenshots of a tweet from a woman who got the Covid-19 vaccine while pregnant, and then a later tweet in which she says her son has died. The Instagram post caption says “if you inject something that is incompatible with human life – results are always the same”.
The tweets come from a now-private Twitter account, although screenshots of the tweets exist elsewhere online. We have no reason to believe the tweets aren’t genuine.
And while we don’t know the medical situation surrounding her two-and-a-half-month-old son’s tragic death, we do know that the vaccines aren’t “incompatible with human life”.
The Instagram post seems to be implying that the Covid-19 vaccinations are not safe to have either during pregnancy or while breastfeeding. However, medical bodies recommend that it’s safe both to have the vaccine during pregnancy and breastfeed after having the vaccine
We’ve written before that Covid-19 vaccines are recommended at any stage of pregnancy. Guidance from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) says real-world data from the USA, where over 160,000 pregnant women have been vaccinated, has not raised safety concerns. In the UK, as of the end of August 2021 over 81,000 women who reported that they were or could be pregnant had received a first dose (and the true number is likely to be higher than this).
And as we have written previously, breastfeeding after being vaccinated is recommended as safe based on all the evidence so far. Guidance from the RCOG says that Covid-19 vaccines are recommended for those who are breastfeeding.
The RCOG says: “There is no plausible mechanism by which any vaccine ingredient could pass to your baby through breast milk.”
UK charity the Breastfeeding Network says on its website: “As with other vaccines, there is no evidence that anything other than antibodies passes into your breast milk. These antibodies are not harmful to your baby, and may give some protection against the virus.”
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the vaccine is recommended as safe to mother and baby during pregnancy and while breastfeeding.
*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Full Fact can be found here ***
