The Washington Post reports:

Arianna Eisenberg endured long-haul covid-19 for eight months, a recurring nightmare of soaking sweats, crushing fatigue, insomnia, brain fog and muscle pain.

But Eisenberg’s tale has a happy ending that neither she nor current medical science can explain. Thirty-six hours after her second shot of coronavirus vaccine last month, her symptoms were gone, and they haven’t returned.

“I really felt back to myself,” the 34-year-old Brooklyn therapist said, “to a way that I didn’t think was possible when I was really sick.”

Some people who have spent months suffering from long-haul covid-19 are taking to social media to report their delight at seeing their symptoms disappear after their vaccinations, leaving experts chasing yet another puzzling clinical development surrounding the disease caused by the coronavirus.

“The only thing that we can safely assume is that an unknown proportion of people who acquire SARS-CoV-2 have long-term symptoms,” said Steven Deeks, an infectious-disease physician at the University of California at San Francisco. “We know the questions. We have no answers. Hard stop.”

Those questions include: If long-haulers are suffering from immune systems that went awry and never reset, why would vaccines — which rev up the immune system — help some of them? Are reservoirs of coronavirus hiding in the body? Are some long-haulers experiencing a placebo effect from the vaccine? Or does the disease simply take longer to run its course in some people?

U.S. clinicians and researchers have yet to come to a consensus on even a definition for long-haul covid-19. They do not know how many people have it, what all the symptoms may be or who tends to develop problems that persist or begin after the virus is cleared. [Continue reading…]