BCG vaccine and COVID

[SamSpade]

I have - unwittingly - now run across about a half dozen articles relating the possibilty of resistance to COVID - and the BCG vaccine.
This is an older vaccine given to prevent tuberculosis. And again, it is interesting to me that a vaccine or treatment intended to kill or otherwise protect against a BACTERIA is showing effectiveness against a VIRUS.

I was on a group for children adopted from Eastern Europe. As you might expect, children adopted from there are far more likely to have been vaccinated with an OLDER form of prevention - Eastern Europe, Russia - they're not widely known for being up to date with medical technology. But peoplebegan to notice that these kids adopted from abroad were showing resistance to COVID, and the common factor was the BCG vaccine.

What is MOST interesting to me is that it provides ANY resistance to COVID when our current vaccine only promises months of protection as opposed to years or a lifetime. None of the kids were adopted recently - yet they demonstrate resistance.

I'm not going to add links - it is easily searchable.

 

[Tilted]

It's interesting. I wouldn't conclude anything yet based on the epidemiological studies though. The only one I found which I think might tell us something was too small. The difference in incidence between the compared groups amounted to about 20 people; hard to rule out that that was just noise. There are apparently a number of clinical trials underway now though.

That said, I don't think it would be too surprising to find that there actually is a meaningful effect, from the BCG vaccine, on people's immune responses to SARS-CoV-2. Vaccines can effect both our innate immunity and our adaptive immunity. So even though a given vaccine might not, effectively, give us some degree of acquired immunity to a virus it wasn't designed for, it could help our immune responses to that virus and others.

I guess we'll see. Maybe it would help explain the higher tested incidence in the U.S. versus most of the rest of the world. I didn't realize this before, but apparently most of the rest of the nations of the world have had universal BCG vaccine policies.