Recent studies have begun to show that the latest bivalent COVID-19 booster vaccine may help ease long COVID patients' symptoms.
Dec. 5, 2022 – Jackie Dishner hasn’t been the same since June 2020, when COVID-19 robbed her of her energy level, ability to think clearly, and sense of taste and smell. Yet at 58, the Arizona writer is in no hurry to get the latest vaccine booster. “I just don’t want to risk getting any sicker,” she says.
Dishner has had two doses of vaccine plus two boosters. Each time, she had what regulators consider to be mild reactions, including a sore arm, slight fever, nausea, and body aches. Still, there’s some evidence that the newest booster, which protects against some of the later variants, could help people like Dishner in several ways, says Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, a clinical epidemiologist and prolific long COVID researcher at Washington University in St. Louis.There may be other benefits.
Each time people are infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, they have a fresh risk of not only getting severely ill or dying, but of developing long COVID, Al-Aly and colleagues found inin November. “If you dodged the bullet the first time and did not get long COVID after the first infection, if you get reinfected, you’re trying your luck again,” Al-Aly says. “I would advise people not to get reinfected, which is another reason to get the booster.
Vaccines prompt the body to produce antibodies, which stop a microbe from infecting cells. They also prompt the production of immune cells called T cells, which continue to hunt down and attack a pathogen even after infection. A booster dose could help rev up that immune response in a patient with long COVID, says Stephen J. Thomas, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, NY, and the center’s
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