Vaccine saved lives, still recommended
A Butler Health System/Excela primary care doctor who discussed long COVID-19 with the Butler Eagle also shared information on the results of the vaccine developed to combat its potentially deadly symptoms.
Dr. Samuel Detwiler said the COVID-19 vaccine has proven a worthy deterrent to long COVID, as some studies show even one dose reduces the odds of developing long COVID by seven to 10 times.
“I still highly recommend that my patients get vaccinated and boosted,” he said.
Detwiler said vaccine recommendations can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.
Regarding the vaccine’s effect on the deaths caused by COVID-19, Detwiler said there were 761,402,282 cases worldwide as of March 29, including 6,887,000 deaths, that were reported to the World Health Organization.
As of April 2, 13,321,840,096 vaccine doses have been administered worldwide.
“To give some perspective on the impact of the COVID vaccines, most modeling studies show the U.S. COVID death toll alone would be more than four times higher without the impact of the vaccines,” Detwiler said.
He said a 2022 study in The Lancet medical journal estimated that while the pandemic has seen more than 3.5 million deaths since the vaccine was first administered in December 2020, it is estimated that vaccinations also prevented almost 20 million additional deaths.
