Your questions, answered "Can vaccines and boosters protect someone from developing long covid if they end up getting infected?" — Kim in Virginia Research suggests that vaccines and boosters do protect you from long covid in two important ways: first, by preventing you from getting sick in the first place; and second, by reducing the incidence in those who get breakthrough infections. Long covid has flummoxed researchers and doctors since the early days of the pandemic. Millions of people around the world have reported fatigue, shortness of breath, difficulty concentrating, and other problems that last long after infection. There's no firm definition for this condition, and no definitive diagnosis, but it's generally described as symptoms persisting for several weeks or more. A recent non-peer-reviewed study out of Israel found that people who'd gotten two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were far less likely to report common long covid symptoms than unvaccinated people. Researchers spoke with more than 3,000 people who had tested positive. According to the results, vaccinated patients were 54 percent less likely to report headaches, 64 less likely to report fatigue, and 68 less likely to report muscle pain than those who weren't vaccinated. Another study released in September produced similar findings. Researchers looked at data from more than 1 million users of a covid-19 symptom tracker app in the United Kingdom and found the risk of long covid was slashed by half in those with two vaccine doses. "The reasons for vaccination beyond the most pressing need to avert severe disease and deaths are manifold, but foremost it is to prevent long COVID," Anthony De Soyza, an expert in respiratory medicine at the British National Institute of Health Research, said of the study in the Lancet medical journal. It's not clear why vaccines may ward off long covid in infected people — in large part because scientists don't know what causes this condition to begin with. One possibility, as described by the journal Nature in November, is that the immune protection generated by vaccines stops the virus before it can establish viral "reservoirs" in the body that may be linked to long covid. Whatever the case, the research isn't conclusive, and the data was collected before omicron peaked. Like so much related to long covid, vaccines and boosters, scientists need more time to observe the real-world effects of the disease and prevention efforts before we get a firmer answer. The unfortunate reality about long covid is that anyone can get it, regardless of their vaccination status or even the severity of their illness. Many cases resolve on their own after a few weeks or months, while some people experience debilitating symptoms that last much longer. But the latest data is encouraging — as is the fact that two separate studies independently reached similar results. | 
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