Long-Haulers Are Pushing the Limits of COVID-19 Vaccines
When I spoke with Letícia Soares on March 12, day 335 of her battle with COVID-19, she was celebrating an anniversary of sorts. It had been 11 months to the day since the start of her illness—an unrelenting sickness that has pinwheeled her through more than 65 symptoms, including fatigue, nausea, migraines, diarrhea, chest pain, hair loss, asthma, abdominal pain, brain fog, heart problems, and painful inflammation in both eyes. When the vaccine rollout began, she and her partner, who also has long COVID, couldn’t help but worry. “Is it safe?” she recalled thinking at the time. “Could it exacerbate our symptoms?”
The clinical trials, for any of the vaccines, had no answers: None set out to study the safety and efficacy of the shots in this population. And although long COVID is a chronic and debilitating condition, it is not among the chronic and debilitating conditions that currently qualify someone for a vaccine. Soares and her partner intend to get their shots when they become eligible. Still, when news of the vaccines’ success broke, “we didn’t know what it meant for us,” Soares, a 36-year-old biologist at Western University in Ontario, Canada, told me. “There was no empirical evidence to reduce our anxiety.”
Many long-haulers are still lining up for vaccination, in hope of guarding against a future tussle with the coronavirus and a more severe bout of disease. (Early evidence hints that COVID-19 survivors do produce a strong immune response to the virus, but might need the extra jolt offered by vaccines to keep their defenses high.) Now, as more shots roll out, a second potential perk has emerged: A scattering of long-haulers report that their COVID-19 symptoms have mysteriously after their shots—an astounding and unexpected pattern that’s captured the attention of experts worldwide.
