While vaccines have proved effective to prevent severe COVID-19, their impact to prevent long-term symptoms have not yet been fully understood. But a research team at NDORMS (Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology, and Musculoskeletal Sciences), University of Oxford has found that vaccination against COVID-19 consistently reduced the risk of long COVID symptoms.
Dani Prieto-Alhambra, Professor of Pharmaco- and device epidemiology, who led the study explained: 'Vaccines against COVID-19 were rapidly developed to tackle the pandemic and to date 8 vaccines have received authorisation from international regulators including EMA and MHRA, with billions of doses delivered to date. These vaccines proved to be highly effective in preventing severe COVID-19 but it's known that around 1 in 10 people suffer from persistent symptoms, what we call long COVID. We wanted to assess if COVID vaccines had any impact on long COVID symptoms, and obtained funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) to conduct a study to research this.'