A new paper: Correlation between universal BCG vaccination policy and reduced morbidity and mortality for COVID-19: an epidemiological study says that vaccination for tuberculosis has a potentially large effect on COVID-19 problems. This explains some of the strange differences between countries. That’s bad news for the U.S. (which hasn’t required the vaccine), good news for some countries.
That’s extremely interesting. I would love to see someone in our community who I trust to be good at statistics redo the analysis, since all the data is public.
Apparently there are already multiple trials underway, though: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/can-century-old-tb-vaccine-steel-immune-system-against-new-coronavirus . The Science article came out before the paper, so I wonder where the idea struck first.
Apparently the broader pro-immune effects of the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis have been known or suspected for a long time; see e.g https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31055165 “Non-specific effects of BCG vaccine on viral infections”, http://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.cmi.2019.04.020, which is a fucking wild read and I highly recommend reading the whole paper.
It is also a hope in type 1 diabetes: https://www.google.com/search?q=bcg+diabetes—this is really unexpected stuff.
A new paper: Correlation between universal BCG vaccination policy and reduced morbidity and mortality for COVID-19: an epidemiological study says that vaccination for tuberculosis has a potentially large effect on COVID-19 problems. This explains some of the strange differences between countries. That’s bad news for the U.S. (which hasn’t required the vaccine), good news for some countries.
That’s extremely interesting. I would love to see someone in our community who I trust to be good at statistics redo the analysis, since all the data is public.
Apparently there are already multiple trials underway, though: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/can-century-old-tb-vaccine-steel-immune-system-against-new-coronavirus . The Science article came out before the paper, so I wonder where the idea struck first.
Apparently the broader pro-immune effects of the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis have been known or suspected for a long time; see e.g https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31055165 “Non-specific effects of BCG vaccine on viral infections”, http://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.cmi.2019.04.020, which is a fucking wild read and I highly recommend reading the whole paper.
It is also a hope in type 1 diabetes: https://www.google.com/search?q=bcg+diabetes—this is really unexpected stuff.