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Daniel Griffin was unsure of what to expect when his patients with chronic symptoms of COVID-19 started getting vaccinated. We feared the shooting would make matters worse by triggering the immune system. Fortunately, the opposite seemed to be true.
“I started getting texts and calls from some of my co-workers saying hello to me, do your long-term COVID patients report that they feel better after the vaccine? says Griffin, a clinician and infectious disease researcher at Columbia University. When he started talking to patients he saw that they were. “It’s not 100 percent, but it seems to be about a third,” he says.
Early reports from Griffin and others suggest that people with persistent symptoms may improve after being vaccinated. Information is still limited and the data is largely anecdotal – but if the pattern continues, it could help researchers better understand why symptoms of COVID-19 persist in some people and offer a way to provide relief.
Many Griffin patients who have improved have had significant side effects after their first injection of Moderna or Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. This is common in people who have had COVID-19 before – they already have a certain level of antibodies, so the first shot acts more like a second booster. Then her patients with chronic symptoms began to report that their sense of smell was improving or that they weren’t as tired. “For some of them it was short lived. But for a while it persisted – they went ahead, got their second hit and say, wow, they really feel like there’s light at the end of the tunnel, ”Griffin says.
A number of people who catch COVID-19 experience symptoms – such as fatigue, shortness of breath, or loss of smell – months after their initial illness. For some, these symptoms are debilitating. Many people who fell ill in the first wave of the pandemic a year ago are still not fully recovered. Doctors like Griffin are learning more about what’s called the “long COVID,” but answers are still limited. Any hint of a path to relief “would be nothing short of a miracle,” says Diana Berrent, founder of the COVID-19 Survivor Corps Survivor and Long Haul Group.
Some patient surveys attempt to get an early reading of the extent of improvement. Director Gez Medinger, who covers lengthy COVID on his YouTube channel, interviewed nearly 500 people in various long-haul support groups on Facebook. About a third of those surveyed said they felt a little or quite better when they were at least two weeks after vaccination.
Dozens of people who took a Facebook group survey for Survivor Corps said their symptoms improved slightly or almost completely disappeared. “We were really worried that people would have a bad reaction. It never occurred to us that they would actually improve, ”Berrent says. Another group of survivors, Patient-Led Research, is also investigating people with long-term COVID who have been vaccinated.
There are limits to these types of surveys – they are small and limited to people who seek out and participate in support groups. They cannot prove that the vaccine is what led to improvement in symptoms. But they can direct researchers to useful research questions.
There are plausible biological reasons why vaccination could help people with COVID long, says Akiko Iwasaki, immunologist at Yale University. Scientists are still not sure why some people have chronic symptoms, but one theory is that the virus or fragments of the virus remain in their bodies. They are not contagious, but the leftovers continue to irritate the immune system. Vaccination could eliminate them. “Potentially, those leftovers are removed because you generate a lot of antibodies,” Iwasaki said. The edge.
Another theory is that, for some people, COVID-19 triggers lasting changes in the immune system and could activate healthy cells and tissues. In this case, the vaccine could help by giving a jerk to the immune system. “It may reset some of those existing responses,” Iwasaki says. In this case, the improvement in symptoms would probably be short-lived and only last as long as the vaccine is in effect.
There is a lot more to learn about the relationship between long COVID and vaccines. It will take increasingly rigorous survey data to understand exactly what proportion of people feel better after being vaccinated. There are ongoing studies that monitor certain inflammatory proteins in the blood of people with chronic symptoms, and researchers could compare the levels in people who are and are not vaccinated, Griffin says.
Research should also verify whether one type of vaccine is more effective at reducing chronic symptoms than others. Even though Moderna, Pfizer / BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines also work well in preventing serious infections, they can vary in their ability to help people with COVID along. “Once we know that, we can recommend people with COVID get vaccinated,” Iwasaki says.
These data would also help clarify the reasons why people have chronic symptoms. If a significant number of people improve in the long term after being vaccinated, Iwasaki says she would lean towards the virus residue theory. “For that, once you get rid of the virus, that’s all – you don’t have it anymore.” She notes, however, that everyone has different experiences with the disease. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.”
Berrent still thinks it’s too early to say for sure how many vaccines can actually help people with COVID long. “I think this is all very interesting,” she said. “I feel like we’re still collecting data here.” It is encouraging, however, that they have not wrong reactions to the vaccine, and any minor improvement is exciting.
Early reports are prompting people with chronic symptoms of COVID-19 to get vaccinated, Griffin says. “It doesn’t sound harmful and it can be therapeutic. I think it’s encouraging for people with long COVID to sign up as soon as they can. “
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