(This is not a political statement. I am honestly interested in what the state of empirical evidence on the issue is and I found it hard to find out anything definite about it as a layman.)
Could it be caused by vaccinations? Probably not. There seem to be plenty of unvaccinated people with long covid. The politicization of things might make it hard to study in general. Many of the people who were not vaccinated will insist they just had the flu, or a bad cold and would have avoided any sort of official diagnosis.
Could vaccines have made it worse? This is probably even harder to answer definitivel
For this to be logical, you need to state that vaccinated people do not have long covid.
If Group A and Group B have similar outcomes, then the outcome would seem to not be correlated to the difference between Group A and B.
Whether or not the vaccine is a cause of long covid symptoms is not the same as whether the vaccine prevents long covid symptoms.
What do your groups represent?
Both groups can catch COVID. Both groups can develop long COVID symptoms.
This fits with "There seem to be plenty of unvaccinated people with long covid."
You said:
"For this to be logical, you need to state that vaccinated people do not have long covid."
Which I don't follow.
- If long COVID is unrelated to being vaccinated, but is caused by having a COVID infection, you would expect both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups to develop long COVID symptoms because they can both have COVID infections.
- If the vaccine causes long COVID (but a COVID infection itself does not) then you would expect non-vaccinated people to not get long COVID.
So if both groups get long COVID symptoms, it seems unlikely that the vaccine causes it while COVID does not. You also can't expect the vaccinated group to report 0 cases of long COVID since they can still have COVID infections.
Perhaps the long COVID rates would be different between the two groups. Or the severity of initial infection and symptoms. Maybe vaccinated people are more likely to have a COVID infection but not report any symptoms or a positive test result at the time of infection because their symptoms are milder.
My point is not to provide evidence or make a claim one way or the other, but just to say that the presence of long COVID in both groups is not evidence that the vaccine itself is causing long COVID.
And I'm happy to amend my statement to "For this to be logical, you need to state that vaccinated people (who never had covid) do not have long covid."
Right, but it does provide insight into the vaccine being the primary cause of long COVID, rather than an actual COVID infection.
So it depends on how you interpret “the vaccine causes long COVID” meaning exclusive to or inclusive of COVID also causing long COVID.
"vaccinated people (who never had covid) do not have long covid."
seems very difficult to study in the general population given the prevalence of COVID infections among the population and the ability for people to not know or test whether they have had COVID, even if they did have a mild infection.
I don't really understand how that is relevant in this context? Aren't there plenty of people who never suffered from long covid, but suffer from irritable bowel syndrome, both vaccinated and unvaccinated as well?
We also now know that the manufacturing process for some brands was different from the trial groups to general availability, the latter of which contained much more varied biological material.
So, what could a bunch of unpure mRNA, RNA, and DNA strands coated in an immune system-evading 'nano-coating' do to your body? God only knows at this point, we didn't do the science to find out.
Point 1 was in a Pfizer document first leaked from Japan's government in mid 2021, officially released a year or more later.
Point 2 (ish) was in a footnote in Pfizer's FDA approval notice, there were formulation changes in the inactive ingredients between the EUA and brand version for (IIRC) shelf-life stability. I don't remember details on the exact difference being in there though, and I don't remember differences between the trial and EUA versions (but scaling up can cause this by accident).
I can't find the reference at the moment, but I believe they used PCR to replicate the mRNA during the trials, and used the bacteria replication for the subsequent versions.
Here's a professor giving testimony to his findings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWHhrHiiTY
I have not heard of people saying they contracted long covid is response to the vaccine (without getting covid) - though I will admit I've tried to stay away from long covid news these days.
I didn't say either/or.
Then it took me more then half a year to get back to that point. It was a very slow recovery but most importantly, it could be quantitatively measured first from how far until I had to disembark my bike to walk up the rest of the hill to eventually the lowest gear I had to to shift into to get to the top without ever disembarking.
I’ve never had any other flu-like sickness cause me to be weak for so long.
One should remember that the flu has been around forever, so the flus you are comparing to were probably the 10th exposure - recovering from a new illness - and not being a small child - may take much longer.
Out of all these it's quite simple to dismiss the psychological explanations of LC. There are obvious physical changes found in various tissue and blood in LC patients. Changes that we can be reasonably certain aren't caused by mental issues.