The new data on the vaccine’s benefits comes as the coronavirus is on the rise again and a new, updated vaccine based on the newest strains is being developed.
Vaccines against the coronavirus significantly reduce the chance of prolonged Covid, according to a large new study, which found that the risk of serious complications has decreased, but not disappeared, as new variants of the coronavirus have emerged.
Scientists looked at people infected in the first two years of the pandemic in the United States and found that over the long term, the rate of vaccinated people who developed Covid was lower than that of unvaccinated people.
Research, publication New England Journal of Medicine, compared the medical records of more than 440,000 war veterans with Covid-19 with the records of more than 4 million people who did not contract the disease. The analysis showed a reduction in long-term Covid cases for everyone during the Delta and Omicron variants, but a two-fold reduction for those vaccinated when the Omicron variant prevailed.
New information about the benefits of the vaccine comes at such a time The coronavirus is on the rise again and a new, updated vaccine based on the newest strains is being developed.
In the unvaccinated group, at the start of the pandemic (before coronavirus vaccines were released), 10.42 out of 100 people developed Covid a year after infection. During the delta variant (19 June to 18 December 2021), 9.51 per 100 unvaccinated people were diagnosed with Covid in the long term, compared to 5.34 per 100 vaccinated people. When the current Omicron era begins (on December 19, 2021), the gap has widened: for a long time, 7.76 out of 100 unvaccinated people developed Covid, but only 3.5 out of 100 vaccinated people did.
“Vaccines clearly work, but it’s also clear that they don’t completely eliminate the risk,” Ziyad Al-Aly, the study’s lead author, said in an interview.
The protective effect of the vaccine has also been shown by previous studies. So did the fact that severe Covid infections and underlying illnesses increase someone’s chance of developing Covid for a long time. Jai Marathe, associate professor of infectious diseases at Boston University and director of the ReCOVer/long COVID clinic at
Boston Medical Center, emphasizes that the new publication shows that the type or number of comorbidities does not affect long Covid. “If the vaccine alters the immune response, we need to study this further to understand the interaction between viral infection and the immunological changes that contribute to the development of prolonged Covid,” he said.