5 ms·

Honest question: How much is really known about long Covid and have there been studies investigating whether similar symptoms could be caused by the vaccines as

Honest question: How much is really known about long Covid and have there been studies investigating whether similar symptoms could be caused by the vaccines as well? (This is not a political statement. I am honestly interested in what the state of empirical evidence on the issue is and I found it hard to find out anything definite about it as a layman.)

ljf 3y ago
There were a huge number of people who had long covid symptoms before vaccines were available. I have not heard of people saying they contracted long covid is response to the vaccine (without getting covid) - though I will admit I've tried to stay away from long covid news these days.
- starbugs 3y ago
  > There were a huge number of people who had long covid symptoms before vaccines were available. I didn't say either/or.
badcppdev 3y ago
[flagged]
- starbugs 3y ago
  > You know a lot of people got Covid before the vaccines even existed... > So really you are asking if all the researchers are idiots No. I did not say either/or. I also don't think this is a productive way of having a conversation.
- snapcaster 3y ago
  This is a really aggressive and bad faith response. do better please
  - watwut 3y ago
    It is actually accurate reframing of the question. And yep, that question was likely to be politically motivated too.
    - starbugs 3y ago
      If you don't allow other people to ask questions, then I think it's more likely that you are yourself politically motivated. This question might be asked by someone who has someone near them suffering said symptoms after having been vaccinated or after having suffered from long Covid (or both). It's entirely unpolitical. Honestly, it's worrying that we still aren't able to speak about these things openly without this kind of comment even in a community like this.
  - badcppdev 3y ago
    Fine. But I was very sad that the questioner didn't do some googling before they introduced a spurious question about vaccines into a comment thread about long covid. 20% of the US population remain unvaccinated. I think that 60 million people is a sufficient control sample to be able to tell the difference between long covid issues and vaccine issues.
hotpotamus 3y ago
I've seen people claim that the vaccines ultimately cured their long covid. My suspicion is that a significant portion of long covid cases (and I'd be willing to bet a majority) are better described as anxiety disorders. I say that as someone with a large amount of personal knowledge on the subject of anxiety gained over a lifetime. Including lots of bowel issues.
- wayfinder 3y ago
  Well I could reasonably bike up one specific very steep hill near my place without downshifting much until I got covid. Then it took me more then half a year to get back to that point. It was a very slow recovery but most importantly, it could be quantitatively measured first from how far until I had to disembark my bike to walk up the rest of the hill to eventually the lowest gear I had to to shift into to get to the top without ever disembarking. I’ve never had any other flu-like sickness cause me to be weak for so long.
  - beagle3 3y ago
    I didn’t either, but a friend did take almost a year to completely recover what was (likely) the flu. One should remember that the flu has been around forever, so the flus you are comparing to were probably the 10th exposure - recovering from a new illness - and not being a small child - may take much longer.
- Izkata 3y ago
  If I remember right, something like 60% of people who claim to have long covid have never tested positive for covid. It could be they never got a test, or it was just too long to still be positive, but whatever the exact number was it was a really high percentage so I'm also leaning towards a large amount of it being psychosomatic or having some other cause.
- perbu 3y ago
  This is very typical. If you know a lot of about anxiety, you'll have an anxiety bias and will try to explain everything as anxiety. Psychologists will also perceive LC to be psychological. Immunologists tend to think it is immune related, gastrologs think it is gut-related, etc. Out of all these it's quite simple to dismiss the psychological explanations of LC. There are obvious physical changes found in various tissue and blood in LC patients. Changes that we can be reasonably certain aren't caused by mental issues.
Tobani 3y ago
How much do we know? Probably not as much as we might think we know. Could it be caused by vaccinations? Probably not. There seem to be plenty of unvaccinated people with long covid. The politicization of things might make it hard to study in general. Many of the people who were not vaccinated will insist they just had the flu, or a bad cold and would have avoided any sort of official diagnosis. Could vaccines have made it worse? This is probably even harder to answer definitivel
- psychlops 3y ago
  > Could it be caused by vaccinations? Probably not. There seem to be plenty of unvaccinated people with long covid. For this to be logical, you need to state that vaccinated people do not have long covid.
  - stetrain 3y ago
    Hm? If Group A and Group B have similar outcomes, then the outcome would seem to not be correlated to the difference between Group A and B. Whether or not the vaccine is a cause of long covid symptoms is not the same as whether the vaccine prevents long covid symptoms.
    - goda90 3y ago
      The real question would be can long covid symptoms develop from the vaccine alone, without covid infection.
      - stetrain 3y ago
        And that's tough to study in the general population since a lot of vaccine recipients have had covid infections, whether or not they even realized it or tested positive.
      - climatekid 3y ago
        This. It’s also very possible people can get long COVID from COVID, but it’s exacerbated and/or more likely for those who are vaccinated
linuxftw 3y ago
We don't know what systemic effects the vaccines have because the companies lied and said the vaccines stay at the injection site (aka, therefor they don't need to do more expensive testing). We also now know that the manufacturing process for some brands was different from the trial groups to general availability, the latter of which contained much more varied biological material. So, what could a bunch of unpure mRNA, RNA, and DNA strands coated in an immune system-evading 'nano-coating' do to your body? God only knows at this point, we didn't do the science to find out.
- Izkata 3y ago
  To downvoters: Point 1 was in a Pfizer document first leaked from Japan's government in mid 2021, officially released a year or more later. Point 2 (ish) was in a footnote in Pfizer's FDA approval notice, there were formulation changes in the inactive ingredients between the EUA and brand version for (IIRC) shelf-life stability. I don't remember details on the exact difference being in there though, and I don't remember differences between the trial and EUA versions (but scaling up can cause this by accident).
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    Thanks, I'm not talking about the difference in the EUA and the Approved versions. I'm talking about the clinical trial vs all subsequent versions with regards to how the actual vaccine genetic material was produced. I can't find the reference at the moment, but I believe they used PCR to replicate the mRNA during the trials, and used the bacteria replication for the subsequent versions. Here's a professor giving testimony to his findings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWHhrHiiTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWHhrHiiTY
psychlops 3y ago
The symptoms remain untestable and therefore can be mixed with a host of other issues and diseases that are untestable. They will not be able to differentiate between a person with long covid, a person with long covid plus another untestable similar disease, or a person with an untestable similar disease for a long time, if ever.

ljf 3y ago

There were a huge number of people who had long covid symptoms before vaccines were available. I have not heard of people saying they contracted long covid is response to the vaccine (without getting covid) - though I will admit I've tried to stay away from long covid news these days.

starbugs 3y ago
> There were a huge number of people who had long covid symptoms before vaccines were available. I didn't say either/or.

badcppdev 3y ago

[flagged]

starbugs 3y ago
> You know a lot of people got Covid before the vaccines even existed... > So really you are asking if all the researchers are idiots No. I did not say either/or. I also don't think this is a productive way of having a conversation.
snapcaster 3y ago
This is a really aggressive and bad faith response. do better please
- watwut 3y ago
  It is actually accurate reframing of the question. And yep, that question was likely to be politically motivated too.
  - starbugs 3y ago
    If you don't allow other people to ask questions, then I think it's more likely that you are yourself politically motivated. This question might be asked by someone who has someone near them suffering said symptoms after having been vaccinated or after having suffered from long Covid (or both). It's entirely unpolitical. Honestly, it's worrying that we still aren't able to speak about these things openly without this kind of comment even in a community like this.
- badcppdev 3y ago
  Fine. But I was very sad that the questioner didn't do some googling before they introduced a spurious question about vaccines into a comment thread about long covid. 20% of the US population remain unvaccinated. I think that 60 million people is a sufficient control sample to be able to tell the difference between long covid issues and vaccine issues.

hotpotamus 3y ago

I've seen people claim that the vaccines ultimately cured their long covid. My suspicion is that a significant portion of long covid cases (and I'd be willing to bet a majority) are better described as anxiety disorders. I say that as someone with a large amount of personal knowledge on the subject of anxiety gained over a lifetime. Including lots of bowel issues.

wayfinder 3y ago
Well I could reasonably bike up one specific very steep hill near my place without downshifting much until I got covid. Then it took me more then half a year to get back to that point. It was a very slow recovery but most importantly, it could be quantitatively measured first from how far until I had to disembark my bike to walk up the rest of the hill to eventually the lowest gear I had to to shift into to get to the top without ever disembarking. I’ve never had any other flu-like sickness cause me to be weak for so long.
- beagle3 3y ago
  I didn’t either, but a friend did take almost a year to completely recover what was (likely) the flu. One should remember that the flu has been around forever, so the flus you are comparing to were probably the 10th exposure - recovering from a new illness - and not being a small child - may take much longer.
Izkata 3y ago
If I remember right, something like 60% of people who claim to have long covid have never tested positive for covid. It could be they never got a test, or it was just too long to still be positive, but whatever the exact number was it was a really high percentage so I'm also leaning towards a large amount of it being psychosomatic or having some other cause.
perbu 3y ago
This is very typical. If you know a lot of about anxiety, you'll have an anxiety bias and will try to explain everything as anxiety. Psychologists will also perceive LC to be psychological. Immunologists tend to think it is immune related, gastrologs think it is gut-related, etc. Out of all these it's quite simple to dismiss the psychological explanations of LC. There are obvious physical changes found in various tissue and blood in LC patients. Changes that we can be reasonably certain aren't caused by mental issues.

Tobani 3y ago

How much do we know? Probably not as much as we might think we know. Could it be caused by vaccinations? Probably not. There seem to be plenty of unvaccinated people with long covid. The politicization of things might make it hard to study in general. Many of the people who were not vaccinated will insist they just had the flu, or a bad cold and would have avoided any sort of official diagnosis. Could vaccines have made it worse? This is probably even harder to answer definitivel

psychlops 3y ago
> Could it be caused by vaccinations? Probably not. There seem to be plenty of unvaccinated people with long covid. For this to be logical, you need to state that vaccinated people do not have long covid.
- stetrain 3y ago
  Hm? If Group A and Group B have similar outcomes, then the outcome would seem to not be correlated to the difference between Group A and B. Whether or not the vaccine is a cause of long covid symptoms is not the same as whether the vaccine prevents long covid symptoms.
  - goda90 3y ago
    The real question would be can long covid symptoms develop from the vaccine alone, without covid infection.
    - stetrain 3y ago
      And that's tough to study in the general population since a lot of vaccine recipients have had covid infections, whether or not they even realized it or tested positive.
    - climatekid 3y ago
      This. It’s also very possible people can get long COVID from COVID, but it’s exacerbated and/or more likely for those who are vaccinated

linuxftw 3y ago

We don't know what systemic effects the vaccines have because the companies lied and said the vaccines stay at the injection site (aka, therefor they don't need to do more expensive testing). We also now know that the manufacturing process for some brands was different from the trial groups to general availability, the latter of which contained much more varied biological material. So, what could a bunch of unpure mRNA, RNA, and DNA strands coated in an immune system-evading 'nano-coating' do to your body? God only knows at this point, we didn't do the science to find out.

Izkata 3y ago
To downvoters: Point 1 was in a Pfizer document first leaked from Japan's government in mid 2021, officially released a year or more later. Point 2 (ish) was in a footnote in Pfizer's FDA approval notice, there were formulation changes in the inactive ingredients between the EUA and brand version for (IIRC) shelf-life stability. I don't remember details on the exact difference being in there though, and I don't remember differences between the trial and EUA versions (but scaling up can cause this by accident).
- linuxftw 3y ago
  Thanks, I'm not talking about the difference in the EUA and the Approved versions. I'm talking about the clinical trial vs all subsequent versions with regards to how the actual vaccine genetic material was produced. I can't find the reference at the moment, but I believe they used PCR to replicate the mRNA during the trials, and used the bacteria replication for the subsequent versions. Here's a professor giving testimony to his findings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWHhrHiiTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWHhrHiiTY

psychlops 3y ago

The symptoms remain untestable and therefore can be mixed with a host of other issues and diseases that are untestable. They will not be able to differentiate between a person with long covid, a person with long covid plus another untestable similar disease, or a person with an untestable similar disease for a long time, if ever.