| The evidence for vaccination against Covid-19 is clear: The shots offer remarkable protection against hospitalization and death from the pandemic disease. But they don't presently provide a strong shield against infection, nor the persistent symptoms known as long Covid that can sometimes occur after even a mild case. Multiple studies from the UK and Israel have previously shown that a vaccinated person who comes down with Covid is far less likely to experience long-haul symptoms than an unvaccinated person. This week, a larger study of some 13 million users of the US Veterans Health Administration found vaccination is associated with reducing the risk of long Covid by 15%. Those numbers are not quite as optimistic as previous studies. The new study also provided a sobering reality check on just how debilitating Covid can be: While vaccinated people were 34% less likely than unvaccinated people to die after a coronavirus infection, they were still far more likely to experience health complications after having Covid than those who never caught the virus at all. Our vaccines are great, but they still don't have the ability to eliminate the risks of the virus altogether. That means that two years into a global pandemic, reliance on vaccination alone may not be enough to reduce the long-term health consequences of Covid, says study leader Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at the VA St. Louis Health Care System and clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in Missouri.  Vaccines alone may not be enough to protect against long Covid. Photographer: Hannah Beier/Bloomberg Bob Wachter, chair of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told me the VA study provides "a very concerning set of findings."
Beyond the more than 6.3 million Covid deaths (and counting), doctors, researchers and health authorities have come to recognize the growing burden of illness among survivors suffering prolonged symptoms — what some people describe as the pandemic's second chapter. "We have underestimated what may prove to be a major negative legacy of this pandemic," Wachter says. Al-Aly and colleagues showed that vaccination blunts the chances of Covid-related problems, but doesn't abolish them entirely. Those risks come with concrete implications, Wachter says: We urgently need to understand the underpinnings of long-term Covid symptoms, and whether treatments like antiviral medications might help to reduce the risks of developing them. Covid vaccines are arguably humanity's greatest achievement in responding to the pandemic, but blind faith in their ability to protect may turn out to be another giant misstep. — Jason Gale | 
No comments:
Post a Comment