Can vaccines cure ME/CFS or Long Covid?

[Hutan]

However, this is illustrative of the problems generalising from just one case.

For sure, although the author of the blog does acknowledge that.

Did the JEV vaccine really help me to recover from Long COVID, or was it just a quirk of timing in a recovery that I might have made anyway? I can’t make any causal claims about this from a single case study.

I can understand someone who experienced an improvement around the time of being vaccinated would want to write about it, and who knows, perhaps it is a clue. I'm happy for people to write about most things they think have helped so long as they acknowledge the uncertainty.

I note that this woman's vaccination schedule was pretty full on. It's possible to make a few other hypotheses from this experience, including that the earlier broad immunological challenge was what did the trick, rather than the followup JEV dose. I can imagine some change processes taking a couple of weeks rather than a couple of hours.

Separately from the Long COVID issue, I also needed to update some of my travel vaccines. In April 2022, I got boosters for meningitis; typhoid; tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis (Tdap). I also got a new-to-me vaccine against the Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), the first of a two-dose series. Despite the name, JEV is found across Asia, and I’d been planning a trip to India before I got sick. I decided to get the vaccine as long as I was at the travel clinic, just in case I ever recovered enough to travel.

The days after that first travel clinic appointment passed in the usual haze of fatigue and brain fog. Then I went back for my second dose of the JEV vaccine the following week. Within hours of the second dose, I felt my energy levels starting to improve. That was the first day in months that I hadn’t needed an afternoon nap.

Similar to Peter and his hesitancy to rush out for a JEV vaccine, I won't be rushing out to have a smorgasbord of vaccines either.

 

[Hutan]

again, how long had he been ill? cant have been more than 2-3yrs, this could easily have been a coincidental timing & actually be simple natural recovery surely?

She became ill in Dec 2021 - [edit, as I had assumed her recovery was recent] - she had the vaccinations and followup in April 2022 - so no more than 6 months...

 

[Jaybee00]

So maybe the JEV vaccine didn’t help Rachel much long term after all.

 

[Hutan]

This is a problem with n=1. The illness fluctuates a lot, and there's an enormous desire to think that you are improving.

I think I've written elsewhere, about a year into my illness I got my GP to fill out a health declaration for me, to say that I was now well enough to return to a consulting assignment. I thought that an antimicrobial drug (paromomycin) had cured me of an amoebic infection that was causing the symptoms. It was hopeful thinking on the part of both of us, because I ended up dreadfully sick with a severe urinary tract infection, on my own in a hotel room on the opposite side of the world. I managed to get home, where it took me months to recover. I never did complete that assignment.

I remember telling people at my daughter's school that the same drug was responsible for her feeling better too. (My daughter actually went on to recover, but I think she was always on that trajectory, and I doubt the drug really helped.)

So, I don't blame Rachel Strohm one bit. I expect many of us have been convinced that we have recovered at some point, and some of us might have shared what we believe has fixed us on social media, wanting to help others. The great news of a recovery tends to get shared a lot more than the slow realisations that it wasn't real.

If I was giving advice to people newly diagnosed with ME/CFS or Long Covid, among it, for their sake and ours, would be, 'in the first two years, don't make any public claims about things curing you'.

 

[Mij]

There are also doctors telling patients what they want to hear. Not a bad thing, but it's better to admit that they don't know and that some improvement might take time and to rest.