Catching SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus May Potentially Cause People to Develop Chronic Neurological Diseases Years or Decades Later, Even If They Appear to Have Got Over the Virus: Implications for Vaccination Decisions
When making a vaccination decision, one thing we might consider is the possible very long term health effects of catching SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
I don't mean long COVID, which can appear immediately after an infection with coronavirus. Rather, I mean a coronavirus-induced illness that might manifest years or even decades after you caught this virus.
There are historical precedents of pandemics triggering chronic diseases which only manifest in people years or decades after they caught the infection during the pandemic.
In the 1918 Spanish H1N1 influenza pandemic, for example, which infected one third of the world's population and killed 50 million, some survivors years later developed a neurological disease called encephalitis lethargica, an illness which transformed victims into "living statues" who could barely move. There were about a million cases of encephalitis lethargica appearing, some not manifesting until as late as the 1930s — a good decade after the 1918 pandemic.
In the case of the polio epidemics of the past (now eradicated in the West because of vaccines), some children caught poliovirus and got poliomyelitis, but survived. But it seems the virus may have remained living in a dormant state in these polio survivors, because decades later, when they got older, some of these survivors developed an ME/CFS-like condition called post-polio syndrome.
So it is not beyond the realms of possibility that people who caught coronavirus and got over it, and did not get long COVID, may nevertheless potentially still be hit with a coronavirus-induced disease years or decades later.
These disease-triggering effects of viruses are not limited to pandemics either, but also involve ordinary viruses in circulation: for example, you may catch Epstein-Barr virus (mononucleosis) in your 20s, and then in you 40s it may trigger multiple sclerosis , since EBV is strongly linked to MS, and like most viruses, once caught EBV lives in your body for life. Or you may catch the common virus coxsackievirus B4, and later develop type 1 diabetes (as CVB4 infection of the pancreas is linked to T1D).
At the moment there is not much to indicate coronavirus will cause very long term issues, so those who've caught coronavirus should not be unduly concerned.
However, the case of encephalitis lethargica has been on the minds of COVID-19 researchers, not least because of the high number of COVID patients who develop neurological symptoms: over 80% of COVID patients in hospital had neurologic manifestations.
So these unknown very long term effects of coronavirus might perhaps be one more consideration in people's vaccine decisions. There are very slight risks to getting a vaccine (and those risks may be higher in people with extreme frailty, or previous allergic responses to vaccination). But there may also be risks of not getting a vaccination, if you catch coronavirus and years later it starts causing health issues.
Edited by Hip, 14 April 2021 - 01:49 AM.
