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Comment by brianmcc | Hacker News Reader

Long Covid. It's not just death and hospitalisations. From The Lancet:

"Patients with Long COVID report prolonged, multisystem involvement and significant disability. By seven months, many patients have not yet recovered (mainly from systemic and neurological/cognitive symptoms), have not returned to previous levels of work, and continue to experience significant symptom burden."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

Frankly we don't really know how bad the long term effects will be for even those with "mild" illness.

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I don't think "from The Lancet" has the same weight as it used to.

The Lancet actually played a major role in promoting anti-vaccine sentiment.

They were the ones who initially published Andrew Wakefield's now-discredited research [1] linking the MMR vaccine to autism. This research and the media attention it garnered massively undermined public trust in vaccines in both the UK and US.

It took them over a decade to officially retract the article.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/

Vaccinated people don’t get “long covid” in appreciable numbers.

There is no data to support this claim.

There is no data to support that they do.

Yes there is. The risk is halved, not zeroed.

That’s not how making claims works

In the UK we're not vaccinating under 18s in volume - not yet anyway. I really don't want my kids to take part in the Great Adolescent Long Covid Experiment.

Long Covid is not a problem in children according to this study:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782164

Hopefully! Although I think "no clear evidence yet" isn't the same as "no problem". From the article itself there is a lack of clarity/conclusiveness:

"Children can experience SARS-CoV-2 postviral syndromes, but it is unclear to what extent these individuals are affected by long COVID"

We've been learning new stuff about COVID for 18 months now. I suspect we'll continue learning more about it for a long time to come. And I'm not keen to bet my kids' wellbeing on "it'll be fine" if I can avoid it (and they may yet catch it anyway - one can't wrap them in cotton wool).

Just saying - I prefer caution over complacency really.

Vaccination only reduces the risk of long covid (as defined by "still symptomatic after 28 days") by about half. It helps but it's no silver bullet.

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