New research shows COVID-19 post-acute sequelae is an autoimmune disease

The COVID-19 public health emergency designation will expire this spring, but the pandemic’s impacts will continue. Long COVID, also known as post-acute sequelae of COVID, or PASC, is a disorder in which persons infected with the virus experience symptoms months or even years after the initial infection has resolved. Brent Palmer, PhD, an associate professor of allergy and clinical immunology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, believes that protracted COVID is caused by viral reservoirs that stay in the body, prompting the immune system to become hyperactive in its attempts to destroy them. Palmer launched a study in 2020 and discovered an inverse relationship between pulmonary function and the frequency of COVID-19-specific T cells in the blood, implying that PASC symptoms are caused by the immune system ramping up inflammation in response to the COVID virus, which remains hidden in the body after the initial infection.

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