There has long been clear evidence that a sustained Covid-19 infection has significantly increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes in a large proportion of the population. In other words: Many pandemic victims now have to inject insulin, their pancreas has been massively damaged. Conversely, the first national disease study by a UK research consortium now suggests that full vaccination has prevented long-term organ damage to the pancreas in many people.
Joachim Müller-Jung
Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the “Nature and Science” department.
This reduces the risk by 30 to 50 percent for more than a year. The results of the investigation are summarized in a not yet independently peer-reviewed pre-publication on the “medRxiv” medical preprint platform.
In addition to some results from Long-Covid research, this is probably the most convincing empirical evidence to date of how the systemic attacks of the Sars-CoV-2 virus in the body can permanently ruin the health of unprotected infected people. This makes it clear once again: Vaccination protection does not only refer to severe respiratory diseases, but can protect many people from the systemic consequences over a longer period of time.
The data for the study come from the electronically recorded disease data in the British databases. In total, more than fifteen million UK citizens were recorded with a Covid-19 diagnosis between early 2020 and late 2021. Of these, more than 11.8 million were vaccinated, around 2.8 million remained unvaccinated up to that point. The risk of diabetes after a proven corona infection before the introduction of the vaccination was compared with the time from June 2021, when many had already received a full vaccination.
Piotr Heller (text), Oliver Schlömer (graphics) Published/Updated: , Anno Hecker Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 31 Published/Updated: Recommendations: 6
It has been shown that having Covid-19 before the vaccine was introduced increased the onset of type 2 diabetes threefold on average. Many still had an increased risk of diabetes months after the infection had been overcome, albeit to different extents. A year later, compared to non-infected people, the risk was still twice as high among seriously ill Covid patients treated in clinics, but it was also about 10 percent higher among Covid 19 patients with mild courses.
After the introduction of the vaccines, the picture changed fundamentally: The vaccines “significantly” reduced the risk of chronic diabetes, as the doctors put it in their report: The diabetes risk determined in the second half of 2021 was suddenly increased by almost five times in the unvaccinated reduced to 1.4 times increased in the vaccinated. The risk was obviously not completely eliminated. However, it has been reduced so much that the risk of diabetes with a vaccination has dropped from the level before the uninfected population a year after the Covid 19 disease.