Vaccination against covid-19 reduces the risk of lung covid, before and after infection with the corona virus.
Statistician Daniel Ayoubkhani of the British Bureau of National Statistics (ONS) and his colleagues followed more than 28,000 people aged 18 to 69 in the UK for a period of seven months.
Contamination research
The participants were part of the wider ONS covid-19 study. Every month between February and September 2021, they were asked how they were doing.
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Time will tell
During this time, all participants tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and they received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. So by the end of this period they were all infected and vaccinated. However, some became infected before the shots were provided at the end of 2020.
The researchers investigated whether the vaccine had an influence on the risk of developing lung covid, in which patients continue to suffer from complaints for a long time after their infection. To do this, they compared the number of participants who received corona before they were vaccinated with the number of participants who received corona after they received the jab. In both groups, the vaccines appeared to reduce the risk of lung covid. So also in participants who were vaccinated after they had corona.
About 24 percent of the participants said they had developed lung covid to some degree during the seven months of the study.
Protective vaccine
The results indicate that a single vaccination dose after infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus reduces the risk of persistent lung covid symptoms by 13 percent. The risk dropped an additional 9 percent when the participants received a second vaccination dose towards the end of the study period.
“We know that long-term Covid symptoms go away and then come back,” says Ayoubkhani. ‘In this study we were able to look at long-term trends, which was a strong point of the study.’
The research suggests that vaccines themselves can directly reduce the risk of lung covid.
The researchers suspect that corona vaccine can attack any remnants of virus particles in the body. “Maybe it has to do with the idea of resetting the disrupted immune system,” Ayoubkhani says. ‘Covid disrupts the immune system. The vaccine can reset it.”
Not a wide group
89 percent of the participants, with an average age of 46, were white. It is thus unclear whether these results also apply to people of other ethnicities. Most family surveys consist largely of white participants, with older and more affluent people also more likely to answer the questionnaires, Ayoubkhani says.
‘I think the generalizability of this research to certain ethnic groups is rightly questioned,’ he says. The researchers did not take into account the severity of the Covid-19 symptoms or the specific vaccine they received.