Some long COVID patients feel much better after getting vaccine
Judy Dodd began struggling with long COVID symptoms last spring — shortness of breath, headaches, exhaustion. Then she got the vaccine.
After her first Pfizer-BioNTech shot in late January, she felt so physically miserable that she had to be persuaded to get the second. For three days after that one, she also felt awful. But the fourth day, everything changed.
“I woke up, and it was like, ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning,’ ” said Dodd, a middle school teacher who is also an actor and director. “It was like I’d been directing ‘Sweeney Todd’ for months, and now I’m directing ‘Oklahoma.’ ”
Dodd, who continues to feel good, is among a number of people who are reporting that the post-COVID symptoms they have experienced for months have begun improving, sometimes significantly, after they got the vaccine. It is a phenomenon that doctors and scientists are watching closely, but as with much about the yearlong coronavirus pandemic, there are many uncertainties.
Scientists are only beginning to study any potential effect of vaccines on long COVID symptoms.
Anecdotes run the gamut: Besides those who report feeling better after the shots, many people say they have experienced no change, and a small number say they feel worse.
Reports from doctors vary too. Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease physician at Columbia University, said about 40 percent of the long COVID patients he has been treating cite symptom improvement after the vaccine.
“They notice, ‘Hey, over the days, I’m feeling better. The fatigue isn’t so bad. Maybe smell is coming back,’ ” Griffin said.
Other doctors say it is too early to know.
“Too few of our participants have been vaccinated so far to really be able to provide insight into this question,” said Dr. Michael Peluso, an infectious disease specialist working on a study of longterm COVID patients at University of California, San Francisco. “I’ve heard anecdotes as well, but I’ve seen too little data so far.”
This month, a small study by British researchers that has not yet been peer-reviewed found that eight months after people were hospitalized for COVID-19, those who were vaccinated experienced improvement in more long COVID symptoms than those who were not yet vaccinated. The 44 vaccinated patients in the study were older and had more underlying medical conditions, since people with those characteristics qualified for vaccines earlier.
Laura Gross, 72, of Fort Lee, N.J., rattled off a lengthy list of debilitating long COVID symptoms she had experienced since April, including exhaustion, joint pain, muscle aches and a “zizzy-dizzyweaky thing that was like an internal, headachy, all-over-body vibration.”
Three days after her first Moderna shot in late January, everything changed.
“It was like a revelation,” she said.
The brain fog cleared completely, muscle aches were gone, joint pains were less intense, and she suddenly had much more energy. It felt, she said, “like the old me.”
Scientists say that understanding whether vaccines help some long COVID patients but not others could help unravel the underlying causes of different symptoms and potential ways to treat them.
“They might be different disease processes, and you manage them differently,” said Dr. Adam Lauring, a virus expert and infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan. “It might be that there’s a subset of people who have a certain type of long COVID who respond well to vaccines, but there might be other people who have a different subtype that we haven’t quite defined yet.”
There are many other questions: Are there specific characteristics — like age, gender, type or duration of symptoms — that might make some long COVID patients more likely to feel better? Would a vaccine be less effective for people with more complex conditions or whose symptoms have changed or fluctuated over time? Are certain types of vaccines more likely to produce benefit?