In June 2020, Michelle Chason tested positive for COVID-19. Even after feeling better and having a negative test, she still had persistent symptoms, including brain fog, short-term memory loss, intensified acid reflux and tingling and numbness on the left side of her face. After showing consistent symptoms throughout October, her doctor diagnosed her with long COVID-19.
“He did everything he could, just treating the symptoms, and it helped,” Chason, 59, said TODAY. “There are times when if I have a lot of brain stimulation, it gets me down. The Super Bowl was over-stimulation that took me down for three days and I really couldn’t seem to work. “
Magnetic resonance imaging and other tests did not reveal what was contributing to his exhaustion, confused thinking and memory problems. It was impressive to Chason that there were so few answers or help.
“It is very frustrating not being able to focus or not being able to watch a TV show or movie. I didn’t take a book to read, ”said Chason. “I hadn’t been able to focus on that. This is bad.”
But in February, Chason’s doctor surprised her with his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. At first, she felt that something was wrong.
“Four days later, on a Sunday, I had a sharp pain in my chest. I was like, what the hell? “she recalled.” I went through everything I went through with COVID, the chills, the nausea, the dull chest pain and the shortness of breath. “
“I’m starting to feel good.”
-Michelle Chason, after receiving a vaccine
After these symptoms subsided, something surprising happened: Chason started to feel, well, better.
“I have more energy. I’m getting up, taking a shower and starting my day. I am working on these projects and putting the house in order after 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 on my own, to be able to drive again and feel normal.”
COVID-19 vaccines and long-distance symptoms
Although experts say there is no research as to why this is happening, they have some ideas as to why people with long COVID-19 report feeling better after vaccination.
“We certainly have a lot of theories that we hope to investigate,” said Dr. Dan Griffin, head of infectious diseases at ProHealth Care, a healthcare provider with 300 locations in New York, TODAY.
“There may be a certain amount of viral persistence and there is a little bit of evidence to suggest that,” said Griffin referring to a preprint of an article that included images finding SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19 ) in the intestinal tract of some patients. If research is accurate, vaccines can help the immune system fight the virus that remains in your system.
“Some people think you get your vaccine and it gives you a robust and really adequate immune response, which allows you to clear any viral remnants that are still in the system, triggering this continuous immune response,” said Griffin.
Dr. Ankita Sagar, director of COVID Ambulatory Resource Support at Northwell Health in New York, agrees that this may be a possibility.
“This information has not yet been outlined because it is very new,” she said TODAY. “One (theory) is that the vaccine is now recruiting some of the cells to actually start building immunity, instead of continuing in the pro-inflammatory state.”
If research proves this to be the case, it could change the way vaccines are used, added Griffin.
“One of the interesting things here is the idea of the vaccine as a medicine for an infectious disease. This is very new, ”he said. “We generally think of vaccines as something that you should give in advance. Once infected, you lose that window. “
But Sagar said it is now unclear whether the vaccine helps people feel better or whether enough time has elapsed since COVID-19’s long symptoms that they are resolving themselves naturally.
“Could it be that perhaps through many of the therapies or therapies and management strategies around prolonged symptoms, they are beginning to see benefits and see recovery and has this just coincided with the date they were vaccinated?” she said. “Absolutely.”
Dr. Reynold Panettieri agreed that what people are experiencing anecdotally could simply be how post-acute COVID-19 works and there is not enough understanding about it yet.
“Some people, probably a minority, will resolve chronic symptoms. You don’t have a control group to see what natural history is, ”the director of the Rutgers Institute of Medicine and Translational Science told TODAY. “How can I tell if this is just a difference in time or a real difference?”
Still, he says that people feeling better after vaccination “is great news”.
Some may think that people with long COVID-19 feel better after the vaccine due to the placebo effect, but Griffin says it usually works differently. In a controlled study setting, people who take sugar pills who think they help with something usually report having tried that help, even though they are not taking the actual treatment. It is different with the vaccine.
“It’s more or less the opposite. Most of them expected to feel worse,” he said.
Still, it is possible that the relief that people experience when they know they are protected may help.
“Now the fear of a second infection has been removed. Is there a psychological benefit to that? This is something that I certainly cannot rule out,” he said.
Even though experts do not have a complete understanding of why patients with COVID-19 feel better after vaccination, they think this news offers another benefit – encouraging vaccination hesitant to be vaccinated.
“It really seems to be rare for people with COVID for a long time to have any negative results from being vaccinated,” said Griffin. “This tends to be consistent. This is what I am hearing from my colleagues, it is what I am hearing from long support groups – that a large part seems to have a significant therapeutic benefit or improvement.”
‘About 75% better’
Juanita Strait wanted to share his experiences to encourage others to get the vaccine. She contracted COVID-19 on March 8, 2020 and has been experiencing symptoms ever since, including tachycardia, brain fog, confused words, hair loss and Graves’ disease (an autoimmune disease). She takes care of her twin sons with autism, so she qualified for a vaccine in January. When she had her first Modern injection, it looked like she had moderate COVID-19 again.
“I had, as my husband and I call it, a trip to Disneyland for COVID all over again because it was all symptoms, just not so extreme, not so long, not so serious and not so scary,” the 56-year-old from Mountain View, California, said TODAY. “It was all the fog in the brain, the word salad, the rapid heartbeat, the beating in my ears, a little dizziness.”