Some Long Haul Covid Patients Are Feeling Better After Vaccination
U.S. News, March 17, 2021.
-- For many, it's like emerging suddenly from a long, dark tunnel. Some people who've been laid low for months by so-called "long haul" symptoms after a coronavirus infection say that within days of getting their COVID-19 vaccine, those symptoms nearly disappeared.
Speaking with The New York Times, Bridget Hayward, a 51-year-old operating room nurse in Alexandria, Va., said that for nearly a year after first becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, she's had a slew of devastating symptoms. They've included persistent body aches, fatigue, a feeling of being hot even in cool weather, and a "brain fog" that rendered remembering even simple words difficult. "It was horrifying," she told the newspaper. "It was awful thinking it may never get better, like 'Is this my new normal, am I now damaged this way?'" But then, just one day after her first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, everything changed. "It was like, click, everything is fine," she said. Her body temperature has normalized and "it felt like a darkness lifted."
Anecdotal cases like this are popping up around the U.S., elating patients and puzzling most experts. Because long COVID is still a mysterious ailment to begin with, figuring out why vaccination is helping at least some patients recover is a black box of sorts, too. One study out of Britain — not yet peer-reviewed — tracked the health of a group of patients who'd been released from the hospital after a bout of severe COVID-19. According to the Times, the study found that those who'd been vaccinated appeared to have more improvement in symptoms of long COVID versus those who hadn't gotten the shot. The improvements weren't uniform, however: Among the 44 patients who were vaccinated, 23% saw improvements in issues like joint pain and breathing, but 5.6% saw a worsening of symptoms post-vaccination. It didn't seem to matter whether the patient got the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine or the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot.
Indeed, 55-year-old Jim Golen, of Saginaw, Minn., told the Times that his long COVID symptoms actually worsened after his two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. For months after becoming infected with the new coronavirus, he experienced symptoms such as chest pain, brain fog, insomnia and shortness of breath. Golen said he was finally getting a bit better when, after the second dose of the vaccine, his chest pain and weakness returned even stronger than before. Still, he stressed that he's glad to have gotten the vaccine, because getting a real case of COVID-19 was much worse.
Cases of long COVID patients feeling better after getting a vaccine do appear to far outnumber those of people who got worse...
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