Long Covid risk falls only slightly after vaccination, study shows
nature.comThere are no conclusions to draw here. The study doesn't "show" anything -- it indicates a need for further research. I'm disappointed that Nature.com is engaging in this kind of sensational journalism.
From their own article:
> He praises the study, which was difficult to perform because of the amount and quality of data, but adds that it is limited because it does not break the data down by key factors, such as the participants’ medical history. “These are very important questions we need answers to,” Putrino says. “We don’t have any really well constructed studies just yet.”
The study also doesn't seem to control for comorbid mental health issues. The pandemic caused a massive spike in anxiety and depression, which (by themselves or due to medications) can result in the same symptoms used to diagnose long Covid in this study: brain fog and fatigue.
There really is nothing to report here yet.
The problem is we've set-up asymmetric incentive structure. Say, there are some uncertainties regarding the risk and aftermath of COVID. If you genuinely underestimate the risk, then you are a pro-grandma killer and one of the worst human beings in the world. But if you overplay the risk, then you are an amazing human being whose only flaw is caring too much about human lives. Unfortunately this becomes another 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' story and also causes a lot of harm in the long run.
> If you genuinely underestimate the risk, then you are a pro-grandma killer and one of the worst human beings in the world.
I totally disagree with this. When omicron started spreading, a lot of scientists jumped to the conclusion that it was less lethal than previous variants. They were happy to share positive-sounding news, regardless of whether they turned out to be wrong. At the beginning, the evidence (from South Africa) was far from conclusive.
Huh, that's the opposite of how I remember it. Where on earth did you see that?
I couldn't see my family for Christmas this year because they freaked out over Omicron and insisted that me and my girlfriend would have to quarantine for 10 days before being able to visit them. This was driven entirely by "scientists" jumping to conclusions that Omicron would be as deadly as Delta but much more infectious and demanding more lockdowns, quarantines etc. They had no scientific basis for this doom-mongering, which appeared to be driven purely by some strange ideological desire for more restrictions.
I told family at the time - this is crazy. All the evidence about Omicron says it's a mild cold. There is no evidence pointing to any other conclusion. The people who discovered it in South Africa are communicating clearly that there's no crisis. Public health scientists are lying, again, because they're claiming there's no data when I was reading about that supposedly non-existent data in the press just yesterday and so you shouldn't listen.
Well, they listened to the "scientists" and not me. For a few weeks, at least. February comes around, nothing about the virus has changed but they suddenly realize that it causes a mild cold and nobody cares. The Queen gets it aged 95 and it's on the front pages for about half a day. She doesn't even stop working. Then they want us to visit so we can do the celebrations we didn't do at Christmas.
So the scores are:
The people from South Africa turned out to be completely correct.South African doctors: 1 native_samples: 1 Public health: -a million, again.
Was this study also with an average age of 71? (cohort was US veterans with 3 week vax interval. Also baseline mortality in the group was 1% over 6mo - definitely an older, vulnerable population).
So yeah, not a representative study at all.
And I'm someone who's somewhat concerned specifically about long covid.
> I'm disappointed that Nature.com is engaging in this kind of sensational journalism.
I am too, but it is not surprising. It's getting them page views. We're also going to be seeing "long covid" articles for years to come as it's going to be a goldmine for research funding.
> It's getting them page views.
But why do they need page views??? It's not like they're going to go bankrupt if they lose advertising revenue. Their greatest asset is their brand name, and they're destroying it for... what?
It makes no sense.
What medications cause anxiety and depression?
Medications for anxiety and depression can cause brain fog and fatigue.
In the past it's been anything from acne medications to birth control and even anti-depressants. Depression isn't an unusual side-effect at all.
Acutane? I remember having a conversation with my doctor as a teenager about it, and even he wasn't sure about cause and effect.
Does the medication cause depression? Or was the person already depressed due to having acne so bad it needed medical treatment? Either direction seems reasonable to me.
That said, he was careful to who he handed it out to, and we decided against it.
Accutane can cause severe depression and suicidal thoughts, but not for everyone. It should definitely be a near-last resort when dealing with severe or cystic acne.
That being said, the before/after pictures that get posted in the accutane subreddit are mind blowing.
yeah the big deal at the time was the 15 year old that tried to pull a mini 9/11, his mom sued the manufacturer of Acutane (later dropped) and it spooked a bunch of parents
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Tampa_Cessna_172_crash?wp...
Christ, you'd think that people might get the message that there's something deeply wrong when you get a feeling like that.
It's a testament to the power of post-structuralism or something.
> there's something deeply wrong when you get a feeling like that
Everyone knows that feeling depressed is deeply wrong.
Medications that can cause depression are often prescribed for serious illnesses, like debilitating mental illness. They don't always cause depression, and the small risk of temporary, treatable depression is determined by the doctor and patient to exceed the risk of the condition that's being treated.
Not exactly a medication but alcohol for one.
But many other drugs can cause these sorts of symptoms too including anti-depressants paradoxically.
Do you mean a treatment for anxiety and depression or a cause?
“Here's to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.” -Homer Simpson
Alcohol can definitely cause anxiety, and make anxiety worse.
I will also suggest alcohol can trigger depression - but that is a claim that is ripe for debate and not well accepted.
Alcohol can also "treat" (in the sense of suppressing symptoms) anxiety and depression, thus leading to a downward spiral since it tends to make these things worse, thus you get into the cycle of "Oh I'm feeling anxious, better have a beer - oh, now my anxiety is worse now that I have sobered up, better have more..."
Alcohol objectively causes physiological CNS depression. Whether or not it necessarily causes the mood of depression or 'major depressive disorder' as diagnosed by clinical psychologists or psychiatrists is another matter.
Birth control among many other medications.
The problem with a study like this is that they probably aren't doing a good job distinguish true long covid from psychosomatic long covid. And there is a lot of evidence that "long covid" correlates much more highly with pre-existing anxiety levels than disease severity.
I think long covid exists I just think there is also a lot of psychosomatic long covid and until we have a good diagnostic criteria to differentiate the two it'll be really hard to study it.
The two most easily diagnosable metrics are a blood test showing reactivated EBV and/or a POTS diagnosis (which involves measurements of how your blood pressure and heart rate change while changing positions). Just because someone doesn't have those doesn't mean they aren't suffering long term effects from COVID.
I've had both consistently for about 2 years now, along with some other neurological symptoms post-covid (no clinical anxiety or depression though). It's made me more of a believer in listening to other people's experiences.
Oh I'm 100% not arguing long covid doesn't exist I have several friends who have long term sequelae from covid. But judging by the research people like yourself and them are probably out numbered by people who have psychosomatic issues.
And that makes studying and treating cases like yours and their's more difficult.
I also 100% believe that psychosomatic diseases are real and need to be taken seriously, they just require a different treatment plan than persistent auto-immunity or permanent lung or heart damage.
It's not an easy distinction to make though. Actual "long COVID" itself is likely to be a collection of ailments (recovery from physical damage to lungs and cardiovascular system, post-viral trigger happy immune systems, possible opportunistic infection or symptoms of existing latent virus due to COVID-induced weakness) which differ from person to person and at least some of those ailments plausibly interact with anxiety (a psychological problem that has physiological effects on blood pressure, cortisol levels etc itself)
The media wants you to believe that the vaccine protects against longterm covid. If it doesn't many people would skip the upcoming 4th, 5th, 6th round because it is providing no additional protection against the latest variants.
But here is an actual study that goes against this story. Will you believe science or myth? Are there enough excuses to keep the myth alive?
Far as I could tell, the study doesn't break it down by whether people have had boosters. So we don't know whether they provide additional protection.
The study also doesn't include omicron, so whether the shots protect against the latest variants is also unknown.
Why does the media care if you get a 4th dose? How does it help them?
Pharma profits handsomely whenever government subsidizes more boosters.
The government isn't exactly rushing to 4th doses. They could authorize it for under 50s right now, but there's little evidence that it makes a significant difference, so they haven't.
Also note that we still don't have vaccines for kids under 5.
If the government wanted to line the pockets of pharma more, there's not a lot stopping them. So it's hard to take blanket statements about this seriously. I'm not denying that this has happened in the past, just that it's a lot more complicated than any single conspiracy theory.
There's probably more money to be made by treating lots of Covid patients in the hospital. Drugs, equipment, exotic treatments, doctor bills. Vaccines are less profitable. Get outta here with your conspiracy theories.
Hypermobility (cartilage dysfunction) and anxiety disorders correlate.
Vitamin D and K interact with cartilage.
Vitamin D deficiency and severity of covid infection correlate. As does obesity. Obesity causes vitamin D deficiency.
Brainfog is a symptom of covid and causes some people to fall down levels of maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Falling down maslow’s hierarchy of needs causes anxiety.
Anxiety depletes the body of B vitamins. B vitamin deficiencies can impact on glutathione production. Glutathione deficiency can impact immune function.
Spinal alignment/stability helps one maintain focus. Poor spinal alignment causes the brain to burn energy on proprioception. Causing mental fatigue, ie brainfog.
When the body is under stress the cellular membranes become less functional. I think this an immune protective mechanism (speculative). I think you can control cellular permeability with lipid ratio ingestion and calorie management. Cellular permeability affects the mitochondrial energy production and immunity. It makes sense that cellular protection is optimised over energy production when recuperating from a viral illness.
The brain impacts the immune system, there is immune memory stored in the brain.
I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome 4 years ago after contracting a chinese flu.
I am writing this because when people write the word psychosomatic I think the same thing. I just think no-one in medicine has a comprehensive understanding of what psychosomatic is.
I also think long-covid is worse than chronic-fatigue. The base damage is worse, then there is the same viral borne psychosomatic condition layered over the top of it.
What the people safely ensconsed up maslow’s needs hierarchy often fail to understand is the immense stress felt by the people sliding down it.
Incremental motivation and autonomy is hugely important to mental health. The homeless and mentally discounted don’t get much. So there’s this often unarrestable downward spiral.
When you land literally on the floor. The way back up is swimmers stretchers an arm, then a leg, then a leg, then an arm. Build up that spinal strength and propioception with whatever spare energy the body has available to it. It takes at least six months and there are numerous crashes.
You need to eat really simple foods because the brain goes into ptsd mode and hypersensitivities emerge.
You need a really comfortable bed because you are in constant pain and can’t sleep.
You need to know you won’t be homeless because the anxiety will wipe out the b-vitamins faster than the you can ingest them.
The support groups will tell you you have a 5% chance of recovery.
I think it is a psychosomatic illness as well but medication won’t help. I also think some people’s immune systems end up in such a state of depletion that it is just a pure untreatable illness for them.
If you try and communicate any of this in the midst of brain-fog the natural assumption is that you are whinging and crazy. Forgiveness helps, anger management helps.
I think permeability of the membrane inner ear is the underlying causitive mechanism of long-covid chronic fatigue syndrome. You need really good potassium concentration in the inner ear for proprioception to work effectively. Lying down plus the cellular stress permeability response depletes this concentration. Hypermobility exacerbates the problem, the membrane is partially cartilagenous.
This leads to brainfog and fatigue when moving. You have to build yourself up really slowly and there are alot of critics. Outwardly you don’t look that terrible.
I spent time figuring this out to get better. Now I work in telesales because a failure mode of the prefrontal cortex (requiring the most brain energy kind of) is that you tend to talk alot.
I’m getting better, slowly crawling back up Maslow’s hierrarchy. No doctor told me any of this.
I got lucky, didn’t believe my diagnosis initially. (Takes the average person 7 years to be disgnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome). I asked for the most alternative physio at the practice I went to for the constant pain. He wouldn’t discuss the condition at all but he got me doing swimmers stretches and propioception exercises.
I can do sideplanks now. What people don’t understand is that your energy doesn’t collapse immediately. It takes up to 72 hours post exertion for the mitochondria to be overwhelmed and the fatigue and brainfog to kick in.
It is very easy for people to arrive at a place of learned helplessness. It is very easy for family members to question your behaviours from the perspective of mental illness. When you yourself don’t understand why your own energy is collapsing.
You can’t differentiate psycho-somatic from the physical. All that will help it is treatment plans that assume there isn’t a psychological cure in and of itself. Physical therapy is hugely important. More research is required into the base damage of the corona-virus. Then the treatment plan needs to regularly tweaked till it gets to the point of basic health maintenance.
No-one’s getting rich of this so I can’t see it happening soon.
My dream is a better collaborative information system for treating chronic illness. I think people are overly focused on causative mechanisms. Body’s heal themselves given the right conditions.
I wish a company existed where people report their pre-existing conditions, symptoms and medical test and diagnostic result then get given a best-practice treatment plans. The results of the treatment plans are monitored using fitbits. Then incremental adjustments are made to the treatment plan using machine learning to search for symptom dopplegangers and discover what worked and what didn’t for other health dopplegangers.
I don’t know why this doesn’t exist. I think the returns on medical research are getting less and less. The body is multisystemic and everybody is unique. But with 8 billion people there are loads of symptom dopplegangers. We don’t need to know why something works to know that it works. The search for why has diminishing return with each level of complexity. A smaller and smaller percentage of the population can afford the latest medical treatments. Medical research is expensive and wasteful. The top of maslow’s hierarchy is really saying that there is no need for why just being.
I think collaborative sympton doppleganger machine learning optimised treatment plans should be the future of medicine. It is what computer innovation should be about.
There should also be a whole lot more research into vitamin-d vitamin k and cholesterol metabolism. This is an intersection of multi-systemic conditions where membrane permeability, hyper-mobility and anxiety correlate.
You can test for hypermobility by straightening your elbow. If it goes backward even a bit, delve further, you are bendy and may need to manage that bendiness proactively.
It seems like there must be a million confounding factors at thing point. Given that immunity eventually wanes and new variants show up, at what point is a person considered no longer 'vaccinated?' I get that people were excited to not need masks anymore, but I'm hanging on to my n95 in most indoor situations, even in my relatively low-risk region.
> Given that immunity eventually wanes and new variants show up
Immunity isn't one thing that wanes.
T-cells are largely permanent and cross-reactive. Somatic hypermutation means that you have B-cells to variants which don't exist yet which can be quickly activated if you encounter them.
There's more to the immune system than circulating NAbs.
The 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic was a bit of a nothingburger because after mutating in pigs for at least 50 years, people born before 1957 still had cross-reactive T-cells to the H1 protein so old people were already immunized.
This is not the human immune system's first goat rodeo with a pandemic virus.
If you are still wearing an n95 and your risk avoidance criteria remain stable, you will be wearing one in public for the rest of your life.
That's your choice, and it's your right, but it's absolutely bonkers, and if you think it should be mandated, you're a totalitarian.
Unfortunately I can't really afford "brain fog" at the moment, and we're still apparently finding out new information about long COVID and vaccines, so I guess it turns out this wasn't actually bonkers.
I'm sure there are lots of diseases that could dehabilitate you; my wife has brain fog from her multiple sclerosis and is still brave enough to go back to regular life because she understands that the risks of serious outcomes from the extant strains are incredibly low, and somehow she manages to be a successful professional with the brain fog.
Life is a risk. You have a lower chance of serious outcome -- assuming you're relatively healthy and younger than 80 -- from the extant strains than you have risk from driving. You can choose to face the risks of life and live, or grow old and die sad and scared.
I choose to be inspired by my wife's courage in the face of her brain fog. Our time on this planet is limited, and spending it afraid is a waste.
> You can choose to face the risks of life ... sad and scared
There are reasons to believe this public will be more than typically keen to consider, in general, risk mitigation.
Risk awareness does not bring «sadness» - on the contrary, it brings relief. Surely, many will also be «scared»: but that is not because of /one's own/ risk mitigation practices - it is an effect of "looking around". In fact, «spending... limited time on this planet afraid» is pretty much an objective perspective. It may avoid you worse predicaments.
And for the ever present mention of «risk from driving»: there are Cost/Risk/Benefits considerations involved. Easily, renewing them may not bring to a reconsideration of the advantage of driving.
Risk evaluation is a matter of tradeoffs. Since I can easily avoid this particular danger and I don't benefit from engaging in it, it isn't 'brave' to get rid of my masks, just foolish.
I'd rather spend my risk budget on things more interesting than showing my chin off at the grocery store.
I found the study „Association between vaccination status and reported incidence of post-acute COVID-19 symptoms in Israel“ (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v...) quite interesting.
See https://postimg.cc/HjjsR2SF for a overview of the results.
Is there any evidence that "long covid" is actually a thing?
It sure seems like a lot of people in the medical community are taking it pretty seriously. Given the quantity of medical journal articles discussing long covid, I'm going to go with YES
It is in articles, and you will not have difficulties in finding anecdotal evidence. Of course, it will depend on the definition. It should be normal to believe that some can suffer semipermanent damages; it is more urging to assess and define the more subtle ones, for mild cases.
It is not clear (to some who follow the matter reasonably in their time) how permanent the damage will be, but for example the first article that results to a search, the "famous" recent "similar in magnitude to the effects of ageing between 50 and 70 years of age",
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258953702...
mentions 10 IQ points lost in a number of patients months after hospitalization... They note: «it is very possible that some of these individuals will never fully recover».
No and yes. Long covid is nothing special. All virus infections can cause the same symptoms. The Epstein-Barr virus for example can make people tired for months.
And years later can cause multiple sclerosis
People definitely report it and genuinely believe they have it.. but similar problems occur in a small subset of all people who recover from infectious diseases.
So it may not be covid specific but it does seem to exist and with a wide ranging illness such as covid then obviously more overall people have it than from say pneumonia.
> People definitely report it and genuinely believe they have it..
This alone is not convincing, since hypochondriacs have never been rare in the first place and for the past few years have been encouraged and doubtlessly felt very vindicated.
If you understood how the brain creates pain and retains memory of the molecules that it interacts with you would understand that hyperchondria is a worse than useless diagnosis for anybody.
Certain people are going to recover faster from illness than other people. It isn’t because they have better mental hygiene.
They are fortunate. If you had long-covid you wouldn’t be able to type that because you would be mentally fatigued. Like Mike Tyson says, everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the face. If your mitochondia locks up on you one day and your energy starts collapsing within 72hours of mild exertion I’d love seeing you blaming your own thinking to fix the situation while everyone else does.
I don’t feel vindicated. I am beating chronic fatigue syndrome anyway, I have to do spinal strenthening exercises, I have to get plenty of sleep, I have eat healthily, I have to not do too much physical exercise in a day, I can’t sit for too long or I end up with post-exertional malaise.
I think the people diagnosing other people with mental-disorders to explain what they couldn’t are going to get progressively more and more exposed as people find non-obvious ways to overcome their chronic multi-systemic health conditions. People are figuring it out.
There is a psycho-somatic component. There is a physical component. It is brought on by viral illnesses.
People with anxiety are prone to it but they are also prone to hypermobility(joint dislocation).
One of us is right. I’d hope I’m not a delusional hyperchondriac. When my fibula pops out of my knee joint and I pop it back in and carry on with my day is that hyperchondria? Or could that be in some way related to managing chronic fatigue syndrome of which long-covid appears to be a sub-set.
60% of people with hyper-mobility have anxiety disorders.
It doesn’t matter to me whether I’m right or you are right. All that matters to me is that I can sustain employment to rise up maslow’s hierarchy. I know that your approach would not have allowed me to do this because I tried it. Believe me I tried it.
I am wondering how much immune "budget" do humans have for vaccines? This topic is left unadressed and is extremely worrying, being an existential risk. Basically, the body has a limited amount of unspecialized naive T cells in its lifetime, mostly located/modulated in the thymus gland, which involute quickly with age.
I suppose that 1) vaccines increase the rate of specialisation of naive T cells to mature t cells (hence the number of naive t cells diminish supraphysically)and I also believe that
2) those specific mature T cells, generating covid spike protein specific antibodies, have lost some or total ability to fight non-covid diseases as a cost of specialization. 1) would increase thymus involution rate and therefore age speed of immunosupression.
2) would reduce generic immune ability (learning other pathogens)
3) I believe the increased immune profile after a vaccine induce a long lasting (at least 6 month) increase of accelerated aging process in humans, via increased inflammation and therefore apoptosis, DNA mutations and oxidative stress, although in a mild form and hence in the medium term asymptomatic.
Above all the premises I enumerated, the 2) is the one I would draw the most attention to, which can be reformulated as: do the repetitive administrations of a vaccine (here the 3 mRNA doses), reduce the effectiveness of the immune system for future non-COVID diseases, and even more importantly, does those doses reduce the immune learnability budget and therefore do those vaccines reduce the effectiveness of future vaccines against the next non-COVID pandemic? There has to be a limit to immune memory, the question is, after how many vaccines do the effect become non-negligible on aging?
study backing chronic inflammation and therefore accelerated aging: > vaccine-induced hypermetabolic lymph nodes https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34857663/
study backing the depletion of lymphocite T helper cell production: Study Shows Immune Cells Against Covid-19 Stay High in Number Six Months After Vaccination https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/....
Moreover, I have an issue understanding why would vaccine not massively lose effectiveness after the age of 70 since at 70 the thymus has ~completely involuted (although maybe the stem cells in the bone marrow suffice?).
> I am wondering how much immune "budget" do humans have for vaccines? ... Basically, the body has a limited amount of unspecialized naive T cells in its lifetime
I'm not a medical professional, so I suspect that my opinion is just as much gibberish as yours clearly is, but with more self-awareness.
Anyway, why would that "budget" be "for vaccines" _only_ ? Vaccines trigger the same mechanism as actual viral attacks, so you may as well ask "does the human immune system have a limited budget to respond to repeated viral attacks". It's the same question. And consider what answer would have better evolutionary fitness.
> I suspect that my opinion is just as much gibberish as yours clearly is, but with more self-awareness.
OK thank you layman for your ad-hominem, I have extensive expertise in medecine and pharmacology and have extensively studied the thymus, spleen, associated peptides and immune and aging biomarkers, so what seems to you as gibberish is actual valid statements or for a few ones, very reasonable and necessary to be asked speculations. But indeed, an expert is often difficult to distinguish from a bullshitter when the layman lacks discernment, a formation in epistemology nor care to check any of the sourced premises.
> why would that "budget" be "for vaccines" _only_ ?
Well for starters I do not question wether there is a budget limit, there is it is a fact. I even explain in detail that a necessary component in the equation are naive lymphocite T and that aging and environement stressors induce an atrophy (involution/shrinkage) of the thymus and therefore of the total number of differentiated mature lymphocytes T. Also obviously I do not say that this only apply for vaccines, real covid is not much different from the spike protein and in fact induce more damage, however the question has to be asked, regardless.
> consider what answer would have better evolutionary fitness
and yet having a limit is an evolutionary fitness as show the existence of thymus involution, both for reduced energy use and programmed aging evolutionnary benefits as shows the many papers on the topic. Obviously, as you should have guessed, the limit only matter to not be reached before the age of reproduction, which is < 20 years old
> I have extensive expertise in medecine and pharmacology
a) not present in your comment history - clearly that's not your focus area - and b) not even spelled correctly and c) I do not believe you
> and have extensively studied the thymus, spleen, associated peptides
Uh uh. Heart, liver and associated oligosaccharides. Gotcha. (this is equally irrelevant gibberish when talking about immune system responses)
> I do not say that this only apply for vaccines
Yeah, you do say that, you say "I am wondering how much immune "budget" do humans have for vaccines?"
12 days is ages ago, but:
While we should always question declarations of expertise without evidence, YCombinator is a place of curiosity and immediately dismissing someone's consideration as gibberish is counter-productive and rude.
> a) not present in your comment history - clearly that's not your focus area - and b) not even spelled correctly and c) I do not believe you
I disagree, there's a significant amount of detailed information in the comment history that suggests this (although I am not vouching for accuracy of any of it.)
> > and have extensively studied the thymus, spleen, associated peptides > Uh uh. Heart, liver and associated oligosaccharides. Gotcha. (this is equally irrelevant gibberish when talking about immune system responses)
Wrong. You didn't even do a web search to check.
The thymus produces immune cells. The spleen generates lymphocytes in response to foreign micro-organisms/viruses. Spleen peptides are used for enhancing immune function after radiation therapy and chemotherapy.
> Yeah, you do say that, you say "I am wondering how much immune "budget" do humans have for vaccines?"
No. Wondering about an immune budget for vaccines does preclude the possibility an immune budget applies to natural immunity.