Can coronavirus vaccination improve long covid symptoms?

 A survey done by British scientists on global patients of long covid has shown that vaccination can improve the condition. As many as 57% of the patients said that they felt better after the doses of vaccines against covid. 

The coronavirus infection and long covid 

Coronavirus is a new infection and hence doctors are still learning about it. Initially it was thought that coronavirus is solely a respiratory illness. Bit new evidences showed that it can infection any body cell including vital organs such as heart, arteries, brain, kidneys, liver, and the like. In many patients, the infection lingered on and these are the long covid cases. Some of them complained of generalized tiredness and mental clouding and anxiety. There was also organ damage in some of these cases. Many of them have been having symptoms for months together. 

Long covid (Source: Pinterest) 

When vaccines came in, it was believed initially that they might worsen symptoms in those with previous infection. Or the vaccines might bring about a relapse of coronavirus infection. But the study found that this was not true. 

Fashion grandmas of China 

The study

The advocacy group LongCovidSOS did a survey on 812 patients of long covid. Most of these were white females from the UK and also other countries. They were contacted by means of social media. These patients had started their vaccination against covid. They were asked to answer the questions after a week of the first dose of the vaccine in order to avoid vaccine side-effects interfering with the responses. 

14 long covid symptoms were enquired into and scored before and after the first dose of covid vaccine. 

The findings of the study

56.7% of the participants said that their symptoms overall improved. But 24.6% felt that nothing changed. A significant 18.7% also felt that there was a worsening of symptoms. 

In the people with improvement in symptoms, more number had taken mRNA vaccines (Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna) while adenovirus vaccine (Oxford/AstraZeneca) was more used in the other two groups. Moderna was better in improving fatigue, brain fog, and muscle pain. Ondine Sherwood, from the patient advocacy group LongCovidSOS said:

"This survey will reassure people that they would have to be quite unlucky to really have an overall worsening of symptoms,” 

“The data is very encouraging, but we don’t know how long the benefits last.”

The study has not been peer-reviewed. And it also means that 1 in 5 patients might have worsening of symptoms. So should one risk it? 

Dr David Strain, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter medical school says:

“There isn’t a blood pressure tablet that fixes everybody … and similarly, there’s not one long-Covid treatment that’s going to fix everyone – but the fact that one treatment does fix something means that there’s bound to be other treatments out there that will fix others.”

It might also be that the symptoms of 56.7% patients might have happened even without a vaccine. There was no parallel group to compare this study results with. Additionally, in 130 patients, after first dose there was an improvement followed by deterioration and then again an improvement after second disease of the vaccine. 

Reasons for the long covid are trifold: lingering virus, lingering viral particles, and person's own immune system. But further research is required in this field.