Vaccines stop long COVID Immediately! Maybe 29 days before you get it!
Eric Topol promotes another misleading analysis
A recent paper is out in BMJ Open; it is kind of funny. It is clearly preposterous. The error is obvious, and guess who is promoting it? First, here is the paper. Allow me to explain.
Simply put, the authors take a French dataset of long covid sufferers, and compare people who were vaccinated vs. those who were not with a sophisticated matching method. (Of course, it can’t correct for unmeasured covariates— but we don’t need to go there)
They ask: is vaccination associated with resolution of long covid symptoms? Resolution is defined as the symptoms vanish entirely. Here is the key Figure. This is the remission rate- meaning all long covid symptoms are gone. Just think about it. And look closer.
Closer
Long covid starts to vanish immediately after vaccination! Vaccines work faster to stop long covid than they can stop the coronavirus. But wait, it actually works even sooner, because the questionnaire says PRIOR 30 days!
The survey is performed every 45 days and asks about the prior 30. (The methods do not state the authors lagged the data) So are the authors saying that vaccines make long COVID go away 29 days before you get it?
Is this a joke? Of course, on twitter, several commenters immediately caught the error, but one did not. Let’s review. The Great Todd Lee.
And, of course Zeb Jamrozik
But guess who just pushed the message uncritically to his audience
Surprise, surprise!
Dejavú over and over again with all these miracle studies
Kind of makes one think that long-covid, at least sometimes, is imaginary, no?