The COVID summer wave is in full swing. With cases rising and new variants continuing to pop up, it’s normal to wonder about your potential for long COVID. Scientists are slowly learning more about the condition, including how to try to prevent it in the first place. Now, new research suggests there’s a clear way to lower your risk of developing long COVID: the COVID-19 vaccine.
That’s the main takeaway from a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. For the study, researchers analyzed medical records of nearly 450,000 people from the Department of Veterans Affairs health system who had COVID-19 diagnosed between March 1, 2020, and Jan. 31, 2022. Those patients were compared with around 4.7 million people who weren’t diagnosed with COVID-19 during the same time.