Some Long-Haul Covid Patients' Symptoms Are Subsiding After Vaccination, WaPo
Last edited Wed Mar 24, 2021, 09:52 PM - Edit history (1)
'Some long-haul covid-19 patients say their symptoms are subsiding after getting vaccines.' Washington Post, March 16, 2021. - Excerpts, Ed.:
Arianna Eisenberg endured long-haul covid-19 for 8 months, a recurring nightmare of soaking sweats, crushing fatigue, insomnia, brain fog and muscle pain. But Eisenberg’s tale has a happy ending that neither she nor current medical science can explain. 36 hours after her 2nd shot of coronavirus vaccine last month, her symptoms were gone, and they haven’t returned.. Some people who have spent months suffering from long-haul covid-19 are taking to social media to report their delight at seeing their symptoms disappear after their vaccinations.. The only thing that we can safely assume is that an unknown proportion of people who acquire SARS-CoV-2 have long-term symptoms,” said Steven Deeks, an infectious-disease physician at the University of CA.. If long-haulers are suffering from immune systems that went awry and never reset, why would vaccines — which rev up the immune system — help some of them? Are reservoirs of coronavirus hiding in the body? Are some long-haulers experiencing a placebo effect from the vaccine? Or does the disease simply take longer to run its course in some people?
U.S. clinicians and researchers have yet to come to a consensus on even a definition for long-haul covid-19. They do not know how many people have it, what all the symptoms may be or who tends to develop problems that persist or begin after the virus is cleared. A December workshop held by the National Institutes of Health that began grappling with those issues suggested that 10 %- 30 % of people infected with the coronavirus suffer some long-term symptoms. And on Feb. 23, NIH announced that it would spend more than $1.1 billion over 4 years to study the effects of long-term covid-19.. Doctors search for treatments for covid-19 long-haulers. But there is little guidance about vaccination for people suffering through extended battles with the disease, other than medical authorities’ instruction that everyone in the U.S. should be immunized. Diana Berrent, founder of Survivor Corps, an online organization of people with long-term covid-19 symptoms, said many members of the group were initially hesitant to comply for fear that the vaccine would create more havoc with their immune systems. One tiny study released Monday but not yet submitted for peer review concluded that people with long-term symptoms who get vaccinated are more likely to see their problems resolve or not worsen than people who have not been vaccinated..
Rebecca Neff, 61, an information technology manager at a mortgage company, thinks she caught a fairly severe case of covid-19 last March in LA and has been paying the price ever since. Although she was never tested and never hospitalized, she has experienced chronic gastrointestinal problems, shortness of breath, fatigue and brain fog. Her hair fell out and her teeth loosened, she said. Neff, who recently moved to Frisco, Tex., said she consistently measured the oxygen level in her blood with a fingertip pulse-oximeter and found it to be 2-3 points below normal for many months. One shot of Pfizer’s vaccine on March 8 has changed all that, she said. “My head is clearer in the last week than it’s been the whole entire year,” she said. “So even though I felt better, I didn’t realize how much I was off.” Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll start to feel better.
Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, said that immunization is likely to reduce the chances of long-term covid-19, based on evidence that shows that vaccines help prevent the disease. “Vaccines will generate good antibody and T-cell responses. They have been already shown to significantly reduce infection, both symptomatic and asymptomatic,” she said.. In a post on the blog Elemental, Iwasaki proposed 3 reasons vaccines might improve people’s symptoms: T cells, boosted by the vaccine, could eliminate a viral reservoir; a heightened immune response could clear any lingering virus fragments; or the vaccine may “divert autoimmune cells,” if long-lasting symptoms are the result of an inappropriate autoimmune response. These are all working hypotheses. “We will try some animal models to test this,” she said, “but my hope is that more and more people will be engaged in this research.”.. Saag said the clues remind him most of long-term Lyme disease, “because there we know the infectious organism . . . is long gone, and the organism seems to have triggered a persistent hyperactive immune syndrome.”...
Read More, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/long-haul-covid-vaccine/2021/03/16/6effcb28-859e-11eb-82bc-e58213caa38e_story.html
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*Survivor Corps*
https://www.survivorcorps.com/
Survivor Corps is one of the largest and fastest growing grassroots movements connecting, supporting, educating, motivating and mobilizing COVID-19 Survivors to support all medical, scientific and academic research, help stem the tide of this pandemic and assist in the national recovery.
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- What Long Haulers Should Know About Getting The Vaccine, Huff Post, 3/15/21
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/long-haul-covid-vaccine_l_604f55b6c5b60e0725f91ed6
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