Of course you would be skeptical, and rightly so. But could it be true? It sounds a little too good to be true.
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medic ... 0271-3.pdf
Anyway, this trial had 155 subjects and it found a 92% efficacy against COVID-19 for the BCG vaccine vs. placebo.INTRODUCTION
The BCG vaccine is a >100-year old vaccine originally developed for tuberculosis protection. It is heralded as the safest vaccine ever developed, with 3-4 billion people already vaccinated and an annual 120 million newborns vaccinated 1. It is highly affordable at about 10-75 cents/dose. Over the last 17 years, randomized clinical trials and epidemiology studies have shown that the BCG vaccine protects humans from a multitude of infections, including upper respiratory tract infections, leprosy, malaria, viral, and bacterial infections 2-16. The first indication of the broad infectious disease protective abilities of this vaccine came 100 years ago when Albert Calmette, the vaccine’s co-inventor, noted a four-fold decline in child mortality (unrelated to tuberculosis) in vaccinated children, presumably from broad infectious disease protection 17. These protective effects appear also when adolescents are re-vaccinated with BCG after the typical newborn dose 10. The BCG vaccine may also protect humans from immune diseases such as type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis 18-21. The mechanisms behind these wide-ranging benefits are a topic of active scientific discovery.
:notsure:
By the way, there's a map (see Figure 2) that shows which countries currently give the BCG vaccine and which countries do not:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3062527/
It seems to be given in most of the world, but not in the US, Canada, most Western European Countries or in the antipodes. Is there any apparent correlation between countries that give this vaccine and those that don't? Hard to say. For example, there's Brazil, and Peru, which give the vaccine but also had a lot of Covid deaths. Some Eastern European countries that give it had very high rates of mortality. Also, just looking for correlations with this map is not scientifically rigorous, of course.
On the other hand, this vaccine is given to babies and adolescents, not old people who were most susceptible. So it could be that we don't see an effect mostly because old people haven't had it recently.
And of course, someone should probably take a hard look at this paper to make sure that it is legit.
So take it all with a grain of salt, but it seems like an interesting possibility.Limitations of the Study
The most important limitation of our trial is that off-target effects take time to systemically manifest, but, once they do appear, they may offer broad-based infectious disease protection over the long-term. BCG does not work as fast as the antigen-specific COVID-19 vaccines and also likely requires multiple treatments over time to be effective, at least in BCG- naïve adults. Antigen-specific vaccines generally take weeks to show an effect although protection is limited by a specific strain and then downstream by short durability. In the case of the BCG vaccine, the off-target platform protection from infections has a slower onset (months to years) but offers perhaps life-long durability. The other off-target effects of BCG are in its reset of autoimmune diseases, benefits that take 2 years to show an effect 18-21. Nonetheless, the benefits may last for decades thereafter as well, at least 8 years in randomized clinical trials. Many of the epidemiologic studies show off-target protection after neonatal or adult vaccination, including one study showing >60 years of protection from a neonatal BCG vaccine 19,59. This “long immunity,” is both long to start and perhaps long-lasting.