Michelle Chason, a reiki master in Tallahassee, Florida, was diagnosed with COVID-19 on June 15, 2020. First, she developed dry mouth. Then came the unpleasant vertigo spells that led to spinning rooms and blackouts.
Chason was negative a month later, but she still didn’t feel well. The left side of his face tingled. She felt pain in her chest, a debilitating brain fog and started having short-term memory problems. Four months after her initial diagnosis in October, Chason’s doctor said she was suffering from prolonged COVID.
When the vaccines started to be distributed, Chason planned to wait and see how the other long-haulers would react before rolling up their sleeves. But on February 10, her doctor offered her the Pfizer vaccine and she took the injection.
Four days after the first dose, Chason said, the symptoms – dizziness, nausea, loss of appetite, chills – struck like lightning. “I’ve been through all the things I’ve been dealing with since I had COVID,” said Chason.
A few days later, the vast majority of his long symptoms of COVID – brain fog, chest pain and tingling in the face – disappeared. “I’m better, I feel better. I’m not 100% pre-COVID, but I’m close, ”Chason told HuffPost.
Worldwide, many other people with long-distance symptoms – a condition now clinically defined as a post-acute sequel to SARS-CoV-2, or PASC – reported similar experiences after receiving a vaccine.
ONE recent informal survey from Survivor Corps, a Facebook community of COVID-19 survivors, found that 36% of people with long-distance symptoms noticed improvements in their condition after vaccination. About 50% remained the same. Other unofficial inquiries also estimated that about a third of patients with long COVID feel better after receiving the vaccine.
At the same time, many others with PASC are hesitant to be vaccinated, concerned that the injection could worsen long-distance symptoms. They worry about being hit by side effects in addition to the long devastating pain of COVID.
In general, vaccines do not appear to worsen COVID symptoms for long. The Johnson & Johnson trials involved several people who already had COVID-19, and these people did not experience a reinflammatory reaction or particularly worse effect, according to F. Perry Wilson, a doctor at Yale Medicine and a researcher at Yale School of Medicine.
But doctors know very little about PASC and how people with the disease can respond to a vaccine. So while it appears that the injection can improve long-term symptoms of COVID in a small group of people, much of what we know today is based on anecdotes.
How long COVID works and how vaccines can affect you
“We don’t know who gets PASC, who avoids it, what exactly is causing it or how to diagnose it effectively,” he said. William Li, a vascular biologist and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation. Without these answers, it is difficult to see clearly how vaccines affect long-haulers, for better or for worse.
Li said the researchers based themselves on some theories about what is happening with PASC. The first is that the virus can damage tissues.
“Perhaps you have been caught by the virus and it will last for a while,” added Wilson. Some researchers think there may be continuous inflammation, and a third theory is that people with PASC have nerve defects.
Final running theory is that long-haulers can have bits of virus hidden in their bodies. These viral bits would probably be undetectable in a PCR diagnostic test frequently used to diagnose COVID-19 – which makes sense, since most patients with PASC are negative – but these viral remains may be triggering the symptoms.
If that is the case, a vaccine can activate the immune system enough to eliminate the lurking virus and restart things. “We can’t explain it yet, but it suggests that boosting the immune system could make a difference for some long-distance travelers,” said Li.
Wilson said it is also entirely plausible that PASC symptoms will simply improve over time, and given that these patients have had symptoms for some time, improvements may coincidentally be happening at the time of vaccination.
There is still a lot to learn about long COVID and vaccines
We need a lot more evidence to find out why some people never fully recover and if and how vaccines can help.
“More research on this phenomenon needs to be carried out, but observation can be an important clue on how to treat PASC,” said Li.
The National Institutes of Health launched an investigation in February to study a lot of COVID. And as more long-haulers receive the vaccines, doctors will have a better idea of whether the injections can be used as a possible treatment for PASC.
For now, most doctors recommend that long-haulers go ahead and get vaccines. Evidence shows that vaccines are safe in a wide variety of circumstances.
“There may be a chance that it will even benefit them, but the chances are that everything will go well,” said Wilson.