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Getting vaccinated against covid-19 after being infected with the coronavirus may lower your risk of long covid.

at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and his colleagues looked at more than 28,000 people living in the UK, aged 18 to 69.

All the participants tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus and received at least one dose of a covid-19 vaccine. However, some became infected before the jabs began to be rolled out at the end of 2020.

The participants, who are part of the wider ONS covid-19 infection survey, received follow-ups each month between February and September 2021, and by the end of this period they had all been infected and vaccinated.

About 24 per cent of the participants said they had experienced long covid to some extent over the seven-month follow-up stage.

The researchers compared the rate of long covid among the participants who were vaccinated post-infection to that in the same group of people before they were vaccinated.

Results suggest that receiving a single vaccine dose after catching the SARS-CoV-2 virus reduces the risk of continuing long covid symptoms by 13 per cent. The risk fell by a further 9 per cent if the participants received a second vaccine dose by the end of the follow-up period.

鈥淲e know that long covid symptoms relapse and remit and they come and go,鈥� says Ayoubkhani. 鈥淪o that鈥檚 a strength of this study that we were able to look at long-term trends.鈥�

The work suggests vaccines can actively reduce the risk of experiencing persistent long covid, he says.

The researchers speculate that covid-19 vaccines may attack any residual SARS-CoV-2 viral presence in the body. 鈥淚t could be due to this idea of resetting the immune system,鈥� says Ayoubkhani. 鈥淐ovid may cause the immune system to dysregulate and so the vaccine may reset it.鈥�

Eighty-nine per cent of the participants, who had an average age of 46, were white, so it is unclear whether these results apply to people of other ethnicities. Most household surveys are largely made up of white participants, with older and more well-off people also being more likely to respond, says Ayoubkhani.

鈥淚 think there鈥檚 a legitimate question around the generalisability to certain ethnic groups [of this study],鈥� he says.

The researchers didn鈥檛 consider the severity of the participants鈥� covid-19 or the specific vaccine they received.