It is estimated that 10% to 30% of people who get COVID-19 have persistent symptoms of the disease, or what is called ‘long COVID’.
Judy Dodd, who lives in New York, is one of them. She spent almost a year suffering from headaches, shortness of breath, extreme fatigue and problems with her sense of smell, among others.
She said she was worried that this ‘battle through life’ would be her new normal.
Everything changed after she got her COVID vaccine.
“I was like a new person. It was the craziest thing ever, ”Dodd said, referring to how many of her health problems had subsided significantly after her second shot.
As the US insists on people being vaccinated, a strange benefit emerges for those with this disease after illness: their symptoms are relieving and, in some cases, recovering completely after vaccination.
This is the latest clue in the immunological mystery of long COVID, a condition still poorly understood, which becomes infected with wide symptoms some months after the initial disease.
The idea that a vaccine aimed at preventing the disease could also treat it has sparked optimism among patients, and scientists studying the syndrome after disease are taking a closer look at these stories.
“I did not expect the vaccine to make people feel better,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine, who has been researching COVID for a long time.
“More and more I started hearing from people with a long COVID who reduced their symptoms or recovered completely, and it was then that I started to get excited because it could be a possible cure for some people.”
While promising, it is still too early to know how many people with a long COVID feel better as a result of being vaccinated and whether this is a statistically significant difference.
Meanwhile, Iwasaki and other researchers have begun to incorporate this question into ongoing studies of long-term residents by monitoring their pre- and post-vaccination symptoms and collecting blood samples to study their immune response.
There are several leading theories as to why vaccines can alleviate the symptoms of long-term COVID: It is possible that the vaccines clear up the remaining virus or fragments, disrupt the harmful autoimmune response, or otherwise ‘repair’ the immune system.
“It’s all biologically acceptable and it’s important that it is easy to test,” said Dr. Steven Deeks of the University of California-San Francisco said. He also studies the long-term impact of the coronavirus on patients.
Patient stories offer hope
Before Dodd, who was in her early fifties, got her vaccine, she felt like she had turned 20 years old.
She had trouble returning to work, and even simple tasks left her with a crushing headache and exhaustion.
“I’ll climb the stairs, and I’ll have to stop at the top and take off my mask just to get some air,” Dodd said.
After receiving her first dose of Pfizer vaccine in January, many of Dodd’s symptoms flared up, so much so that she barely received her second dose.
But she did – and a few days later she noticed that her energy was back, breathing was easier and soon even her odor problems were solved.
“It was as if the sky opened up. The sun was out, ”she said. “This is the closest I’ve felt to COVID beforehand.”
In the absence of major studies, researchers are investigating what information they can get from patient stories, informal surveys, and clinical experiences. For example, about 40% of the 577 long-term patients contacted by the Survivor Corps group said they felt better after being vaccinated.
Among Dr. Daniel Griffin’s patients at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, ‘brain fog’ and gastrointestinal problems are two of the most common symptoms that seem to resolve after vaccination.
Griffin, who conducts a long-term study of post-COVID disease, initially estimated that about 30% to 40% of his patients felt better. Now he believes the number could be higher as more patients receive their second dose and see further improvements.
‘We chatted a bit about this [long COVID] by treating every symptom, ”he said. “If it’s really true that at least 40% of people recover significantly with a therapeutic vaccination, then this is by far the most effective intervention we have for a long COVID.”
In a small UK study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, it was found that about 23% of long-covid patients had an “increase in symptom resolution” after vaccination, compared to about 15% of those who did not vaccinated.
But not all clinicians see the same improvement.
Clinicians at post-COVID clinics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, National Jewish Health in Denver and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have told NPR and KHN that so far a small number of patients – or at all not – reported that they feel better after vaccination, but this was not a common phenomenon.
“I’ve heard anecdotes from people who feel worse, and you can scientifically come up with an explanation of how it’s going in any direction,” UCSF’s Deeks said.
Why do patients feel better?
There are different theories as to why vaccines can help some patients – each relying on different physiological understanding of long COVID, which manifests in different ways.
“The clear story is that long COVID is not just one problem,” says Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who is also studying long COVID and the possible therapeutic effects of vaccination.
Some people have a fast resting heartbeat and do not tolerate exercise. Others suffer mainly from cognitive problems, or a combination of symptoms such as exhaustion, difficulty sleeping and problems with smell and taste.
Consequently, it is likely that different treatments will work better for some versions of long COVID than others, Deeks said.
One theory is that infected people never clean the coronavirus, and that a viral ‘reservoir’, or fragments of the virus, persists in parts of the body and causes inflammation and long-term symptoms, said Iwasaki, the Yale immunologist. said.
According to the statement, the vaccine can cause an immune response that gives the body extra firepower to prevent the remaining infection.
“It would actually be the easiest way to get rid of the disease, because you get rid of the source of inflammation,” Iwasaki said.
Griffin of Columbia Medical Center said this ‘viral persistence’ idea is supported by what he sees in his patients and from other researchers and clinicians. He said patients seem to improve after receiving the COVID vaccines, usually about ‘two weeks later, when they appear to have an effective, protective response.’
Another possible reason why some patients improve comes from the notion of long COVID as an autoimmune condition, in which the body’s immune cells eventually damage its own tissues.
A vaccine can hypothetically kick the ‘innate immune system’ into the air and ‘dampen the symptoms’, but only temporarily, said Iwasaki, who studies the role of harmful proteins, called autoantibodies, in COVID.
This self-destructive immune response occurs in a subgroup of COVID patients while they are ill, and the autoantibodies produced can circulate months later. But it is not yet clear how this could contribute to long-term COVID, says John Wherry, director of the Institute of Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Another theory is that the infection “miswired” the immune system in some other way and caused chronic inflammation, perhaps like chronic fatigue syndrome, Wherry said. In that scenario, the vaccine could somehow “restore” the immune system.
With more than 77 million people fully vaccinated in the US, it’s hard to bother how many people with a long COVID, even without any intervention.
‘Right now we have anecdotes; we would like it to be true. “Let’s wait for some real data,” Wherry said.
This story is part of a partnership that includes NPR and KHN.
Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national news service for health policy. This is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.