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A large US study of whether vaccination protects against long-term covid showed that injections have only a slight protective effect: vaccination seemed to reduce the risk of lung disorders and blood clots, but did little to protect. most of the other symptoms.
The new paper, published Wednesday in Nature Medicine, is part of a series of studies by the Department of Veterans Affairs on the impact of coronavirus, and was based on 33,940 people who suffered from innovative infections after vaccination.
The data confirm the large body of research showing that vaccination greatly reduces the risk of death or serious illness. But there was more ambiguity regarding the long covid.
Six months after their initial diagnosis of covid, the people in the study who were vaccinated had only a slightly reduced risk of getting long covid, a 15 percent overall. The biggest benefit seemed to be in reducing blood clotting and lung complications. But there was no difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated when it came to long-term risks of neurological problems, gastrointestinal symptoms, kidney failure, and other conditions.
“That was disappointing,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, lead author and head of research and development for the VA Saint Louis Health Care System. “I was looking forward to seeing vaccines offer more protection, especially considering that vaccines are our only line of defense today.”
“Long covid” refers to the constellation of symptoms that many people have reported months after their initial infections. At the beginning of the pandemic, some patients complaining of persistent symptoms were dismissed by doctors who thought the manifestations might be psychological. But the disease has since become a major concern for the medical community.
The World Health Organization has defined post-covid syndrome as symptoms that last at least two months and cannot be explained by alternative diagnoses. He cited evidence suggesting that up to 20 percent of the estimated half a million people worldwide who are infected with coronavirus may experience medium- and long-term effects.
This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new estimates of the number of the syndrome in the United States, suggesting that it affects one in five adults under the age of 65 who had covid and one in four in the United States. 65 or more. People in both age groups were twice as likely as uninfected people to develop respiratory symptoms and lung problems, including pulmonary embolism, the CDC found. Those in the older age group were at increased risk of developing kidney failure, type 2 diabetes, neurological conditions, and mental health problems.
The Veterans Affairs Study, which is believed to be the largest peer-reviewed peer review in the United States of COVID, based on medical records, looked at patients who had two doses of Modern or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. or a dose of Johnson & Johnson Vaccine. It did not assess the impact of reinforcing features. Although the study population contained a wide range of racial and ethnic ages and backgrounds, it biased older, whiter, and more male than the United States as a whole.
The VA study also had no way of saying how different variants may change the risk of long covid. These innovative infections, for example, occurred at a time when alpha, delta, and earlier variants were at high levels in the United States. It does not cover the period in which the omicron variant and its subvariants began circulating in late 2021.
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The findings add to the debate over similar analyzes from the UK, Israel and other countries that have shown conflicting results as to whether vaccines protect against long-term covid.
A British study published in the medical journal Lancet, for example, based on self-reported data from an application, showed a 50% reduction in risk among vaccinated people. On the other hand, an article by researchers at Oxford University based on U.S. electronic records found that vaccination did not appear to reduce the risk of long-term covid for most symptoms.
The issue of vaccines and long covid has been critical for doctors. Some patients have claimed that a vaccine has cured them, while others have avoided injections for fear of triggering symptoms.
Igor Koralnik, head of neuroinfectious diseases at Northwestern Medicine, said recent research suggests that neither is true. In an article published Tuesday in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, Koralnik and colleagues found that 77 percent of the 52 long-term covid patients who follow they had been vaccinated against coronavirus, but the injections did not appear to have a positive or negative impact on cognitive function or fatigue.
“There is a neutral effect of vaccination. It did not cure covid for a long time. It did not make covid worse for a long time,” Koralnik said.
Christina Martin, an advanced practice nurse at the post-acute COVID syndrome clinic at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, said that since November, her staff has noticed a “worrying trend” in vaccinated people who have innovative infections and develop long covid.
When the clinic was founded a year ago, he said, they planned to see fewer new patients at that time as more people were vaccinated. Unfortunately, they have seen the opposite, with an increase in the number of patients.
“Now we feel that the long covid has come to stay.… This will have profound implications for our health care system and resources,” Martin said.
David Putrino, a longtime covid researcher who serves as director of rehabilitation innovation at Mount Sinai Health System in New York, shares these concerns. He worries that public health leaders are not taking the current increase seriously enough because they are discounting the risks of a long covid.
Putrino said the demand for appointments at his medical center’s long covid clinic continues to rise and he does not anticipate a slowdown soon. The clinic has treated about 2,500 patients since it opened in May 2020.
“We have failed in our health message that death is not the only serious result of a covid-19 infection,” Putrino said. “. . . I am very concerned that what this will do is lead us to a continuation of this massive disability event that we are seeing with a long covid. “