Vaccines may not prevent many symptoms of long covid, study suggestsA large U.S. study looking at whether vaccination protects against long covid showed the shots have only a slight protective effect: Being vaccinated appeared to reduce the risk of lung and blood clot disorders, but did little to protect against most other symptoms.
The new paper, published Wednesday in Nature Medicine, is part of a series of studies by the Department of Veterans Affairs on the impact of the coronavirus, and was based on 33,940 people who experienced breakthrough infections after vaccination.
The data confirms the large body of research that shows vaccination greatly reduces the risk of death or serious illness. But there was more ambiguity regarding long covid.
Six months after their initial diagnosis of covid, people in the study who were vaccinated had only a slightly reduced risk of getting long covid — 15 percent overall. The greatest benefit appeared to be in reducing blood clotting and lung complications. But there was no difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated when it came to longer-term risks of neurological issues, gastrointestinal symptoms, kidney failure and other conditions.
At the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center’s Post-Acute COVID Syndrome Clinic, Christina Martin, an advance practice nurse, said that since November, her staff has noticed a “worrying trend” of vaccinated people having breakthrough infections and developing long covid.
When the clinic was founded a year ago, she said, they anticipated seeing fewer new patients by this time as more people became vaccinated. Unfortunately, they’ve seen the opposite, with patient numbers going up.
“We now feel that long covid is here to stay. … This will have profound implications on our health-care system and resources,” Martin said.
This is not good. It seemed reasonable to think that vaccinated and boosted people would have reduced chances of getting all kinds of long covid disease. Apparently, that is not the case if this data holds up. Given how large the database is, 33,940 patients, this finding is probably reliable.
It's beginning to look like covid is just never going to go away. The human species just cannot get its act together to fight this. Self-serving crackpots and liars like Faux News and Republican Party elites feed the endless torrent of disinformation, confusion and stupidity, which helps stymie efforts to deal with this. That is not going to change. Dark free speech is legal. It is necessary to keep radical right neo-fascists in power and wealth. Covid has and still is costing trillions, but we just cannot do squat about it on a global scale.
Maybe it's time to accept this new risk as another bad new normal for a long time to come. Maybe forever.
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