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A study has found that vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 virus provides moderate protection against long-lasting COVID that presents with persistent health problems in the months following infection.
The findings, published in the journal Pediatrics, also show that vaccination has a greater impact on teenagers, who are at higher risk of developing long-term COVID than younger children.
The researchers said that while the overall severity of COVID-19 is less in children than in adults, it is difficult to accurately describe the long-term burden of COVID because symptoms can vary widely and The exact ways in which the virus causes it are unknown.
He said some symptoms include brain fog, shortness of breath, gastrointestinal dysfunction, general pain and fatigue, while others are more serious, such as an inflammatory response or heart problems.
“To date, no study has assessed clinical data from large, diverse groups of children to address this important question,” said lead study author Hanih of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), US. Razaghi said.
“Using clinical data from different health care networks allowed us to get a large enough sample of patients to identify rare effects of the virus and its impact on children,” Razzagh said.
Data from 17 health systems were used to assess the effectiveness of the vaccine against long-term COVID in two groups of patients aged five to 11 years and 12 to 17 years, respectively, with same time period when patients were affected.
The vaccination rate in the group of 1,037,936 (over 10 lakh) children was 56 percent.
The incidence of probable long COVID among COVID-19 patients was 4.5 percent, although only 0.7 percent of patients were diagnosed with long COVID.
The study estimates the vaccine’s effectiveness at 35.4 percent against probable long COVID and 41.7 percent against diagnosed long COVID within 12 months of administration.
The estimate was higher in adolescents than in younger children, and higher at six months (61.4 percent) but decreased to 10.6 percent at 18 months.
Children who were vaccinated after recovering from COVID-19 also benefited, with the vaccine’s effectiveness against potential long-lasting COVID after a subsequent episode of COVID-19 at 46 percent.
Senior study author Charles Bailey, associate professor of pediatrics at CHOP, said, “This study provides us with important data showing the protective effects of the vaccine against long-term COVID and suggests that This protection is mostly about preventing visible infections.”
“We hope this means that as vaccines become more effective against existing variants of SARS-CoV-2, their protection against long-term Covid will also improve,” Bailey said.
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