COVID-19 vaccine reduces long Covid risk in children: Study

New Delhi: Vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 virus provides moderate protection against long Covid (according to a research paper, long Covid is name for the health problems that people experience within a few months of Covid diagnosis), a study has found.

The finding, published in the journal Pediatrics, also shows that vaccination has a stronger effect in adolescents, who have a higher risk of developing long Covid than young children. While overall severity of COVID-19 has been lower in children than adults, the burden of long Covid has been difficult to accurately describe since the symptoms can vary widely and the exact ways the virus causes them are unknown, the researchers said.

“Using clinical data from across health care networks allowed us to have a large enough sample of patients to identify rare effects of the virus and its impact on children,” said lead study author Hanieh Razzaghi. Data from 17 health systems were used to assess vaccine effectiveness against long Covid in two groups of patients between five and 11 years old and 12 and 17 years old, respectively, as well as the time period in which patients were impacted.

The vaccination rate was 56 per cent in the cohort of 1,037,936 (over 10 lakh) children. The incidence of probable long Covid was 4.5 per cent among patients with COVID-19, though only 0.7 per cent of patients were clinically diagnosed with long Covid.

The study estimated effectiveness of the vaccine within 12 months of administration as 35.4 per cent against probable long Covid and 41.7 per cent against diagnosed long Covid. The estimate was higher in adolescents compared with younger children, and higher at six months (61.4 per cent) but decreased to 10.6 per cent at 18 months.

Children who were vaccinated after recovering from COVID-19 also appeared to benefit, with vaccine effectiveness of 46 per cent against probable long Covid after a subsequent episode.