Studies Show Vaccines Have Some Effectiveness in Preventing Long COVID

Two large studies show that “COVID-19 vaccines are protective against long COVID.” CIDRAP has the news.

In the first study, “researchers measured the real-world efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT162b2) vaccine against long COVID in children and adolescents using data from 20 US health systems.” 112,950 adolescents were included for the analysis against the Delta variant, and 188,894 children and 84,735 adolescents were included for the analysis against the Omicron variant.

For adolescents during the Delta period, “the estimated effectiveness of the BNT162b2 vaccine against long COVID was 95.4% (95% confidence interval [CI], 90.9% to 97.7%). During Omicron, the estimated effectiveness against long COVID among children was 60.2% (95% CI, 40.3% to 73.5%), and it was 75.1% (95% CI, 50.4% to 87.5%) among adolescents.” The risk reduction was “largely linked to reducing the risk of COVID infection in the first place.”

A second study, “a population-based analysis from Japan,” found “the vaccine effectiveness of three or more doses of COVID vaccine against Omicron-related long COVID to be 30%, and against neurologic symptoms of long COVID it was 39%.” Strangely, this protection was “only found in women.”