What about the fall booster and long COVID?

[LAS14]

I've seen two articles from September that claim that the booster is effective against long COVID. But I don't see anything on the CDC site. But the CDC site, for people like me, isn't very helpful.

Sorry, but I couldn't find those two articles when I searched again today. There are a lot of articles dating to May through August saying that vaccines are not effective against long covid, but I'm interested specifically in the one released on about Sept 8.

Is there reliable info that the booster is effective against long COVID?

tia
las

[Ocelot II]

1. There might not be enough data yet to know, since the new booster just came out.

And researchers aren't sure what causes long covid, which takes a lot of different forms, in the first place.

[ARPad95]

2. I think this Sep 23rd Q & A from Yale Medicine might cover your question.

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/omicron-booster-covid-19

How will we know if the boosters are effective?

We won’t have definitive answers on how well the new bivalent boosters prevent infection or provide long-term immune protection until the human trial data is completed and the vaccine is used widely in eligible people. The FDA based its decision to authorize the bivalent vaccine on safety and effectiveness data from both of the monovalent mRNA vaccines.

They also took into account safety and immune response data from clinical studies of the BA.1 bivalent COVID-19 vaccines, which are similar to the new BA.4/BA.5 bivalent boosters. Those studies, conducted by Pfizer and Moderna, showed the BA.1 bivalent vaccines induced a strong antibody response to both the original strain and BA.1. The companies also said that although the BA.1 vaccines prompted significant antibody responses against BA.4 and BA.5, they were not as strong as they were against BA.1.

Pfizer and Moderna have only submitted mouse data for the BA.4/BA.5 boosters. Although not released publicly, Pfizer shared preliminary findings at a June FDA advisory meeting; the findings included eight mice that were given the BA.4/BA.5 booster as their third dose. Those mice, compared with the mice given the original vaccine, showed an increased antibody response to all Omicron variants tested.

[blogslug]

3. This Time article was published September 8

archive link: https://archive.ph/ujMfT

COVID-19 vaccines were designed primarily to prevent severe disease and death—two purposes for which they continue to work very well. But when the shots first rolled out, many people also hoped they would block or even reverse symptoms of Long COVID, such as fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, chronic pain, and neurological issues.

By now, it’s clear that even people who are fully vaccinated and boosted can get Long COVID, and recent research suggests that vaccines aren’t the Long COVID shields people wished for.

Studies have come to very different estimates about the degree of protection vaccines offer against Long COVID. But some of the latest findings point to fairly disappointing protection. In one July report from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, more than 4% of vaccinated and boosted adults in the U.K. who were infected by Delta, Omicron BA.1, or BA.2 still had symptoms at least 12 weeks later. A preprint posted online on Sept. 6 (which has not yet been peer-reviewed) suggests the situation isn’t any better in the U.S. Researchers surveyed people from June into July, as the BA.5 variant was taking over. Among those who said they’d had COVID-19 at least a month earlier, roughly 20% had symptoms that lasted at least four weeks, with little difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

That’s not to say vaccines are useless against Long COVID. A research review published in eClinical Medicine in August analyzed a mix of peer-reviewed and preprint studies, six of which looked at whether people who were vaccinated before they got infected had a lower chance of developing Long COVID than unvaccinated people who got sick. All six studies concluded that vaccinated people are at lower risk...