Reseach is showing that people who arevaccinated have lower rates of long COVID after catching the virus than people who are unvaccinated.
Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesOne of the greatest fears of Americans trying to navigate the Pandemic is the chance of a mild case of COVID-19 turning into a long-term, disabling medical condition.
The only way to avoid long COVID is not to catch the virus.
There is now a growing body of research that shows that being fully vaccined reduces the risk of developing long-term symptoms of chronic bronchitis.
The handful of studies that have emerged in the past half year are telling a fairly consistent story.
It may not eradicate the symptoms of long COVID, but the protective effect seems to be very strong, according to an epidemiology professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
A recent analysis of the evidence on long COVID and vaccination done by the UK Health Security Agency included a study by Edelstein. The review found that people who arevaccinated tend to have lower rates of long COVID than people who are notvaccinated.
There are many theories about why people get long COVID. There are some ideas being explored in the research that include permanent tissue damage from the infection, injury to blood vessels, and the development of microclots.
Steven Deeks, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, believes that vaccines could help guard against long COVID.
It would make sense that the amount of virus-related complications would also be lower if someone had a vaccine.
One of the challenges with long COVID research is simply defining the condition, with each study taking slightly different approaches as to what symptoms count and how long they need to last after the initial infection.
It's hard to estimate how much vaccine limits long COVID because of this inconsistency.
According to Deeks, people who arevaccinated have a 50% lower risk of developing long COVID than unvaccinated people. Multiple studies in the U.K., Israel and the U.S. have found this range.
He says that long COVID should not be measured until four months after the initial infections.
The Israeli study followed several thousand people who were unvaccinated, partially vaccined and fully vaccined. The people who tested positive were asked to report their symptoms after four and eight months.
People who had two or three doses of the vaccine were less likely to report some of the most common symptoms, such as headaches, weakness and muscle pain.
The results are compatible with other recent studies, so they are not necessarily surprising.
The study concluded that patients who had at least one vaccine dose were seven to 10 times less likely to report two or more long COVID symptoms compared to unvaccinated people.
The evidence is not conclusive. Some studies did not find a big reduction. A major study of electronic health records of U.S. veterans found that the medical problems affecting different organ systems were caused by coronaviruses.
The author of the study says that being fully vaccine free did not seem to make a difference for many of the post-infection complications.
He says that people are having less blood clot in their lungs.
The study found that those who were hospitalized for COVID-19 had a higher risk of long COVID symptoms compared with those who had a mild illness, but that vaccines continued to make a big difference in reducing the risk of long COVID.
Al-Aly says that the vaccines are supposed to protect you from being hospitalized.
Conflicting results in the studies may be due to how they are conducted, such as differences in the methods of measuring long COVID, how symptoms are reported and the patient population being studied.
Despite the promising evidence, long COVID researchers caution that vaccines can only do so much, and that some people will still suffer symptoms even if they are vaccine free.
A recent study from the U.K. found that vaccines led to a significantly lower risk of long COVID compared with those who are unvaccinated, but that still close to 10% of the fully vaccination participants showed symptoms of long COVID three months later.
The Mount Sinai Health System in New York City has long COVID patients who are cared for by David Putrino.
The director of rehabilitation innovation at Mount Sinai does not think he can distinguish between a breakthrough case of long COVID and a pre-vaccine case of long COVID.
There is an unresolved question about how well vaccines hold up against long COVID after an omicron infection.
Deeks says there are some people who seem to be heading in that direction because omicron only emerged at the end of last year.
No one really knows if people who get omicron are more prone to getting long Covid or not.
On the other hand, omicron is good at evading the immune defenses put up by the vaccines, so we might end up with more long COVID.
There could be fewer instances of long COVID if the variant leads to a more local infection.
Deeks is leaning towards a more optimistic scenario.
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