Daniel Griffin was not sure what to expect when his patients with chronic symptoms of COVID-19 started being vaccinated. There was some concern that the shots could make things worse activating the immune system. Fortunately, the opposite seemed to be true.
“I started getting text messages and calls from some of my colleagues saying hey, your patients with long reports of COVID who are feeling better after the vaccine? says Griffin, an infectious disease clinician and researcher at Columbia University. When he started talking to the patients, he saw that he was. “It’s not 100 percent, but it seems to be around a third,” he says.
Initial reports by Griffin and others suggest that people with persistent symptoms may improve after being vaccinated. The information is still limited and the data is largely anecdotal – but if the pattern holds, it can help researchers understand more about why COVID-19 symptoms persist in some people and offer a path to relief.
Many of the Griffin patients who improved had significant side effects after the first injection of the Moderna or Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. This is common in people who have had COVID-19 – they already have some level of antibodies, so the first injection acts more like a second booster. Then, his patients with chronic symptoms began to report that their sense of smell was improving or that they were not so tired. “For some of them it was short-lived. But for a while, it really persisted – they went ahead, gave it their second chance and are saying, wow, they really feel like there’s light at the end of the tunnel, ”says Griffin.
Several people who get COVID-19 experience symptoms – such as fatigue, shortness of breath or loss of smell – months after their initial illness. For some, these symptoms are debilitating. Many people who fell ill during the first wave of the pandemic a year ago have not yet fully recovered. Doctors like Griffin are learning more about what is being called a “long COVID”, but the answers are still limited. Any indication of a path to relief “would be nothing short of a miracle,” says Diana Berrent, founder of the group of survivors and long-distance COVID-19 Survivor Corps.
Some patient surveys are trying to get an early look at how the improvement is widespread. Director Gez Medinger, who covers the long COVID on his YouTube channel, interviewed almost 500 people in various long distance support groups on Facebook. About a third of the people interviewed said they felt slightly or totally better when they were at least two weeks away from vaccination.
Dozens of people who responded to a survey in the Facebook group for Survivor Corps said their symptoms had improved somewhat or disappeared almost completely. “We were really concerned that people would have a negative reaction. It never occurred to us that they would really improve, ”says Berrent. Another group of survivors, Patient-Led Research, is also researching people with long-term COVID who have been vaccinated.
There are limitations to these types of surveys – they are small and limited to people looking for and participating in support groups. They cannot prove that the vaccine was what led to any improvement in symptoms. But they can point researchers to useful research questions.
There are plausible biological reasons for vaccination to help people with long COVID, says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. Scientists are still unsure why some people have chronic symptoms, but one theory is that the virus or fragments of the virus remain in your body. They are not contagious, but leftovers continue to irritate the immune system. Vaccination can eliminate them. “Potentially, these remnants are removed because you are generating a lot of antibodies,” said Iwasaki The Verge.
Another theory is that, for some people, COVID-19 triggers lasting changes in the immune system and can activate healthy cells and tissues. In that case, the vaccine can help by giving a boost to the immune system. “It can redefine some of the existing responses,” says Iwasaki. In this case, the improvement in symptoms would probably be short-lived and would last only as long as the vaccine started.
There is much more to learn about the relationship between long COVID and vaccines. It will take increasingly rigorous research data to understand exactly what part of people feel better after being vaccinated. There are ongoing studies that monitor certain inflammatory proteins in the blood of people with chronic symptoms, and researchers can compare levels in people who are and are not vaccinated, says Griffin.
Research should also look at whether one type of vaccine is more effective in reducing chronic symptoms than others. Although the Moderna, Pfizer / BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson vaccines work equally well in preventing serious infections, they can vary in how well they can help people with long COVID. “Once we know that, we can recommend people at COVID to get different vaccines,” says Iwasaki.
This data would also help to clarify the reasons why people have chronic symptoms. If a significant number of people improve in the long term after being vaccinated, Iwasaki says he leans towards the theory of viral remnants. “That’s why, after getting rid of the virus, that’s it – you don’t suffer from it anymore.” She notes, however, that each person has different experiences with the disease. “It is not a one size fits all.”
Berrent still thinks it is too early to say for sure how much vaccines can really help people with long COVID. “I find all of this very interesting,” she says. “I feel like we’re still collecting data here.” It is encouraging, however, to see that they are not having bad reactions to the vaccine, and any small improvement is exciting.
The first reports are a good incentive for people with chronic symptoms of COVID-19 to be vaccinated, says Griffin. “It doesn’t look harmful and it can be therapeutic. I think it’s encouraging for people with long COVID to sign up as soon as they can. “