Vaccination reduces chance of getting long Covid, studies find

[superadmin]

Covid vaccination reduces the risk of developing long Covid, while current sufferers may experience an improvement in symptoms after getting jabbed, a comprehensive review by the UK Health Security Agency suggests.

The “rapid evidence briefing” drew together data from 15 UK and international studies, about half of which examined whether Covid vaccination protected against developing long Covid if someone had never been infected, while the rest looked at the impact of vaccination among people who already had long Covid.

It found that, as well as any benefit obtained by not catching the virus in the first place, those who do catch it are less likely to develop long Covid if they have received one or two doses of vaccine compared with unvaccinated individuals.

According to the two studies that measured individual long Covid symptoms, the fully vaccinated were less likely than unvaccinated people to develop medium- or long-term symptoms such as fatigue, headache, weakness in the arms and legs, persistent muscle pain, hair loss, dizziness, shortness of breath, loss of smell or scarring of the lungs.

“There is also evidence that unvaccinated people with long Covid who were subsequently vaccinated had, on average, reduced long Covid symptoms, or fewer long Covid symptoms than those who remained unvaccinated,” the review said.

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