In June 2020, Michelle Chason tested positive for COVID-19. Even after feeling better and undergoing a negative test, she still experienced persistent symptoms, including brain fog, short-term memory loss, sharpened acid reflux and tingling and numbness on the left side of her face. After her doctor had constant symptoms during October, her COVID-19 diagnosed her.
“He treated everything as well as possible, just treated the symptoms, and it helped,” Chason, 59, said TODAY. ‘There are times when I have a lot of brain stimulation when I have a lot of brain stimulation. The Super Bowl was about stimulation that disrupted me for three days and I really could not function. ”
MRI scans and other tests did not show what contributed to her exhaustion, confused thinking and memory problems. It was overwhelming for Chason that there were so few answers or help.
‘It’s very frustrating not to be able to focus or watch a TV show or a movie. “I did not pick up a book to read,” Chason said. “I could not focus on that at all. That’s bad. “
But in February, Chason’s doctor surprised her with her first dose of Pfizer vaccine. At first, she felt like something was wrong.
‘Four days later, on a Sunday, I got chest pains. I was like what the hell? she remembered. “I went through everything with COVID, the cold fever, the nausea, the dull pain in my chest and shortness of breath.”
“I’m starting to feel good.”
-Michelle Chason, after receiving a vaccine
After the symptoms subsided, something surprising happened: Chason began to feel better.
‘I have more energy. I get up and shower and start my day. I am working on these projects and getting the house back in order of a year of quarantine, ”she said. “I’m starting to feel good.”
Chason is not alone. She and other members of Survivor Corps, an online support and advocacy group for people with long COVID-19, reported some improvement after vaccination.
“It was very exciting for me,” she said. “I just want to be able to do things myself, drive again and feel like I was normal.”
COVID-19 vaccines and long-term symptoms
While experts say there is no research into why this happens, experts have some ideas as to why people with a long COVID-19 feel better after vaccination.
“We definitely have a lot of theories we want to investigate,” said Dr. Dan Griffin, head of infectious diseases at ProHealth Care, a healthcare provider with 300 establishments in New York, said TODAY.
“There is a certain degree of viral persistence and there is some evidence to suggest that,” Griffin said, referring to a preview of an article containing images containing SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID -19 caused). the intestinal tract of some patients. If the research is accurate, the vaccines could possibly help the immune system fight the virus that remains in their system.
“Some people have the idea that you are getting vaccinated, and that gives you a very good, robust immune response that enables you to clear viral remnants that are still in the system, which elicits this ongoing immune response,” Griffin said. said.
Dr. Ankita Sagar, director of COVID Ambulatory Resource Support at Northwell Health in New York, agrees that this could be a possibility.
“The information still needs to be delineated because it’s so new,” she said TODAY. “One (theory) is that the vaccine is now recruiting some of the cells to start building immunity rather than continuing with the pro-inflammatory condition.”
If research proves this to be the case, it could change how vaccines are used, Griffin added.
‘One of the exciting things here is the ideas of vaccine as a remedy for a contagious disease. This is very new, ‘he said. ‘We usually consider vaccines to be something you have to give ahead of time. Once infected, you miss that window. ‘
Sagar said it is unclear at this time whether the vaccine is helping people feel better or whether enough time has passed since the long COVID-19 symptoms began to resolve naturally.
“Could it be that perhaps through many of the therapeutic or therapies and management strategies around long-term symptoms they are beginning to see benefit and begin to see recovery and that it coincided with coincidence when they were vaccinated?” she said. ‘Absolutely.’
Dr. Reynold Panettieri agreed that what people experience anecdotally may simply be how the post-acute COVID-19 works and that there is not yet enough understanding of it.
‘Some people, probably a minority, will resolve chronic symptoms. “You do not have a control group to see what natural history is,” the director of the Rutgers Institute for Translational Medicine and Science said TODAY. “How do I know it’s just a time difference or a real difference?”
He still says that people feel better after vaccination is ‘good news’.
Some may think that people with a long COVID-19 feel better after the vaccination due to a placebo effect, but Griffin says that it usually works differently. In a controlled study environment, people who take sugar pills that help them report something they normally experience, even though they do not take the actual treatment. With the vaccine, it is different.
“It’s kind of the opposite. Most of them expected to feel worse,” he said.
It is, after all, possible that the relief that people experience because they know they are protected can help.
“Now the fear of a second infection is being taken away. Is there a psychological benefit there? This is something I certainly cannot rule out,” he said.
Although the experts do not fully understand why long COVID-19 patients feel better after vaccination, they think this news offers another benefit – it encourages the vaccine to get the vaccine.
“It seems rare for people with a long COVID to have negative results if they are vaccinated,” Griffin said. “It tends to be consistent. That’s what I hear from my colleagues, that’s what I hear from long-term support groups – that it seems to have a large chunk of significant therapeutic benefit or improvement.”
‘About 75% better’
Juanita Street wanted to share her experiences encouraging others to get the vaccine. She contracted COVID-19 on March 8, 2020 and has had symptoms ever since, including rapid heartbeat, brain fog, confusing words, hair loss, and Graves’ disease (an autoimmune disease). She cares for her twin sons with autism, so she qualified for a vaccine in January. When she gets her first Moderna recording, it feels like she has light COVID-19 again.
“What my husband and I call, I had a Disneyland trip to COVID again because it was all the symptoms, just not that extreme, not that long, not that bad and not that scary,” he said. the 56-year-old from Mountain View, California, told TODAY. “It was all the brain fog, the word salad, the fast heartbeat, the beating in my ears, a little dizziness.”