The Impact of COVID Vaccination on Symptoms of Long COVID: An International Survey of People with Lived Experience of Long COVID, 2022, Strain et al

Abstract

Long COVID is a multi-system syndrome following SARS-CoV-2 infection with persistent symptoms of at least 4 weeks, and frequently for several months. It has been suggested that there may be an autoimmune component. There has been an understandable caution amongst some people experiencing long COVID that, by boosting their immune response, a COVID vaccine may exacerbate their symptoms. We aimed to survey people living with long COVID, evaluating the impact of their first COVID vaccination on their symptoms.

Methods: Patients with long COVID were invited to complete a web-based questionnaire through postings on social media and direct mailing from support groups. Basic demographics, range and severity of long COVID symptoms, before and after their vaccine, were surveyed.

Results: 900 people participated in the questionnaire, of whom 45 had pre-existing myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) but no evidence of COVID infection, and a further 43 did not complete the survey in full. The demographics and symptomology of the remaining 812 people were similar to those recorded by the UK Office of National Statistics. Following vaccination, 57.9% of participants reported improvements in symptoms, 17.9% reported deterioration and the remainder no change. There was considerable individual variation in responses. Larger improvements in symptom severity scores were seen in those receiving the mRNA vaccines compared to adenoviral vector vaccines.

Conclusions: Our survey suggests COVID-19 vaccination may improve long COVID patients, on average. The observational nature of the survey limits drawing direct causal inference, but requires validation with a randomised controlled trial.

Open access, https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/10/5/652/htm

 

Of course this is not a controlled study, so we don't know if the 57.9% that experienced improvement or the 17.9% that experienced deterioration wouldn't have had the same experience due to other factors.

 

There is a strong tendency for those improvements to be short-lived, so if they didn't check at multiple points in time, this is useless.

It's absurd that such research still has to be done through social media, all because healthcare systems refuse to acknowledge LC and leverage the existing resources through general practice (and normally specialist services but frankly none of the LC clinics qualify as specialists at this point). I'm guessing this is why they didn't put much effort into controls or multiple timepoints, any research at this point that relies on social media for recruitment will be ignored by the medical profession.

Nice Catch-22, yet again: can't properly research this because healthcare systems are in denial, and they are in denial because they can't properly research this, because of the pre-existing state of denial.

And it's seemingly impossible to unblock this. It's broken, but there is no process to fix it, there isn't even a process that can look at this and see it's broken.

Medicine's pervasive refusal to do customer service is actually causing it to regress. Customer service is a critical component of quality control. Without quality control, well, you have no quality, it's literally in the name.

 

And it suggests it may not.

I think this conclusion is unjustified. If we are trying to raise the level of evidence and discourage the publication of meaningless data, especially when based on social media and questionnaires, then this is unhelpful.