Kim Updegrove, executive director of Mother’s Milk Bank in Austin, said the unknowns about COVID-19 had caused many fears in the initial three months of the pandemic. The milk bank takes human milk donations and pasteurizes them to provide them to NICU babies in hospitals across the area. That initial fear kicked off a study at the University of California San Diego to determine if breast milk was clear from the virus to give to babies. Ad“The virus sheds RNA in the breast milk, and that doesn’t cause the virus, but it means that there is a SARS-COV-2 presence in breast milk. University of Texas Medical Branch researchers are also conducting a separate study to determine how COVID-19 vaccines impact mothers and breast milk.