Study: Does vaccine help COVID-19 long-haulers?

One of the positive discoveries during the pandemic has been that many COVID-19 patients whose symptoms have persisted or who have developed new ones reporting they have found relief when they’ve been vaccinated.

The long-haulers, as they have become known, have reported finding their pains dissipating, their brain fog lifting and other aftereffects of COVID disappearing.

Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Medicine, specializing in microbial diseases, is launching a research study to find out how vaccines improve longhaul COVID. She is recruiting long-haulers who have not been vaccinated to take part.

Working with a support group known as Survivor Corps, which has been tracking every detail about COVID that its members can record, Iwasaki has found that the vaccines don’t help everyone, but the patients’ experiences show a definite correlation for some.

“Of the people who are in this Survivor Corps survey, 40 percent of people with long-haul disease are reporting improvement,” Iwasaki said. However, some people have felt worse after being vaccinated and the largest group saw no change.

Laura Gross is one of the 40 percent for whom the vaccine was a life-changer. “I was one of the people who were jumping up and down” after receiving her first shot of the Moderna vaccine, she said.

Gross, 72, who lives in

Fort Lee, N.J., and is a marketing and communications professional, got COVID in March 2020 and suffered through the rest of the year.

“I had long-haul symptoms of headaches and muscle pain, joint pain, low-grade fever, G.I. issues, [fatigue], and the worst thing was what the doctors call brain fog,” she said.

Gross’ experience was that she couldn’t keep track of the facts in her brain because “COVID takes all of those and keeps it swirling around and moving so you cannot access it.”

She felt she had lost her identity.

“I got my first Moderna shot on Jan. 28,” a Thursday. “I woke up on Sunday morning and it was almost as if somebody had flipped a switch and I was back,” Gross said. “It was a revelation. It was a remarkable, miraculous feeling.” Her energy, her appetite and her brain functioning had returned.

While she still has some joint and muscle pain and mild fatigue, “the vaccine changed my life,” she said.

Iwasaki has two main theories of how the vaccines may work.

“We are thinking the immune response itself is making people feel better,” she said.

That would be the buildup of antibodies triggered by the vaccine attacking “viral reservoirs” or viral fragments that persist in the body.

The other possibility is that the antibodies created in reaction to the virus “are attacking our own cells.” These cells, known as Tand B-lymphocytes, “usually make antibodies against the virus and protect the person from infection.”

But it may be that the vaccine “can tamp down the toxic effect of these cells, at least for a while,” Iwasaki said. “The vaccine induces cytokines. The cytokines bind to these autoreactive cells and tell them to stop secreting toxic factors.”

For her clinical trial, “we are recruiting people who have long-haul disease who have not yet been vaccinated,” Iwasaki said. “We want to collect their blood and saliva before the vaccine and twice after the vaccine.”

Volunteers must be 18 years old, have been diagnosed with COVID-19, have had symptoms more than two months since they were infected and have not been vaccinated but plan to be.

Diana Barrent of Port

Washington, N.Y., started Survivor Corps, which also has a Facebook group, in March 2020 after she was diagnosed with COVID, as “a way to connect patients with researchers.”

“I realized that if I was going to be one of the first survivors, I certainly was not going to be the last,” Barrent said. She doesn’t consider herself a longhauler, although she suffered pain in her inner ear that decreased after her vaccination.

She cautioned that “we don’t know whether people [who] are feeling better after the vaccine will remain better after the vaccine. … Whatever therapeutic that is found is not going to be a panacea for every person that is suffering from long-term COVID.”

To volunteer, email covidrecovery@yale.edu.