There are no conclusions to draw here. The study doesn't "show" anything -- it indicates a need for further research. I'm disappointed that Nature.com is engaging in this kind of sensational journalism.<p>From their own article:<p>> <i>He praises the study, which was difficult to perform because of the amount and quality of data, but adds that it is limited because it does not break the data down by key factors, such as the participants’ medical history. “These are very important questions we need answers to,” Putrino says. “We don’t have any really well constructed studies just yet.”</i><p>The study also doesn't seem to control for comorbid mental health issues. The pandemic caused a massive spike in anxiety and depression, which (by themselves or due to medications) can result in the same symptoms used to diagnose long Covid in this study: brain fog and fatigue.<p>There really is nothing to report here yet.
The problem with a study like this is that they probably aren't doing a good job distinguish true long covid from psychosomatic long covid. And there is a lot of evidence that "long covid" correlates much more highly with pre-existing anxiety levels than disease severity.<p>I think long covid exists I just think there is also a lot of psychosomatic long covid and until we have a good diagnostic criteria to differentiate the two it'll be really hard to study it.
It seems like there must be a million confounding factors at thing point. Given that immunity eventually wanes and new variants show up, at what point is a person considered no longer 'vaccinated?' I get that people were excited to not need masks anymore, but I'm hanging on to my n95 in most indoor situations, even in my relatively low-risk region.
I found the study „Association between vaccination status and reported incidence of post-acute COVID-19 symptoms in Israel“ (<a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v2.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v...</a>) quite interesting.<p>See <a href="https://postimg.cc/HjjsR2SF" rel="nofollow">https://postimg.cc/HjjsR2SF</a> for a overview of the results.
I am wondering how much immune "budget" do humans have for vaccines?
This topic is left unadressed and is extremely worrying, being an existential risk.
Basically, the body has a limited amount of unspecialized naive T cells in its lifetime, mostly located/modulated in the thymus gland, which involute quickly with age.<p>I suppose that 1) vaccines increase the rate of specialisation of naive T cells to mature t cells (hence the number of naive t cells diminish supraphysically)and I also believe that<p>2) those specific mature T cells, generating covid spike protein specific antibodies, have lost some or total ability to fight non-covid diseases as a cost of specialization.
1) would increase thymus involution rate and therefore age speed of immunosupression.<p>2) would reduce generic immune ability (learning other pathogens)<p>3) I believe the increased immune profile after a vaccine induce a long lasting (at least 6 month) increase of accelerated aging process in humans, via increased inflammation and therefore apoptosis, DNA mutations and oxidative stress, although in a mild form and hence in the medium term asymptomatic.<p>Above all the premises I enumerated, the 2) is the one I would draw the most attention to, which can be reformulated as:
do the repetitive administrations of a vaccine (here the 3 mRNA doses), reduce the effectiveness of the immune system for future non-COVID diseases, and even more importantly, does those doses reduce the immune learnability budget and therefore do those vaccines reduce the effectiveness of future vaccines against the next non-COVID pandemic?
There has to be a limit to immune memory, the question is, after how many vaccines do the effect become non-negligible on aging?<p>study backing chronic inflammation and therefore accelerated aging:
> vaccine-induced hypermetabolic lymph nodes
<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34857663/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34857663/</a><p>study backing the depletion of lymphocite T helper cell production:
Study Shows Immune Cells Against Covid-19 Stay High in Number Six Months After Vaccination
<a href="https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/study-shows-immune-cells-against-covid-19-stay-high-in-number-six-months-after-vaccination#:~:text=Study%20Shows%20Immune,who%20are%20unvaccinated" rel="nofollow">https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...</a>.<p>Moreover, I have an issue understanding why would vaccine not massively lose effectiveness after the age of 70 since at 70 the thymus has ~completely involuted (although maybe the stem cells in the bone marrow suffice?).