Jahnavi Sarma
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Written By: Jahnavi Sarma | Published : July 10, 2020 8:00 PM IST
AIIMS Delhi will begin human trials of India's first indigenous Covid-19 vaccine, Covaxin, from next week on 100 healthy volunteers aged between 18 and 55. @Shutterstock
There is still no vaccine against the COVID-19 virus and it be still be some months before we have one. Scientists are still looking at existing vaccines and drugs to see if these can offer an effective solution. Now, preliminary results of a new study suggests that a century-old tuberculosis BCG vaccine may play a role in reducing death due to COVID-19 infection. Researchers from the US-based National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health made the link to Bacille Calmette-Guerin, or BCG, after comparing data on COVID-19 mortality rates across the globe.
In the study, published in online science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the researchers found that some Latin American regions - including Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil and Mexico City in Mexico - had considerably lower death rates than states in the US such as New York, Illinois, Louisiana and Florida.
According to researchers, this is remarkable, considering that [these parts of] Latin America have much higher population densities than the North American states analysed, including New York. In Europe, Germany also had surprising results - the death rate from COVID-19 was 2.9 times higher among people from the former West Germany than those in former East Germany. And the mortality rate was four times higher in Italy than in Finland.
According to the study, the places where death rates were lower varied in terms of age distribution, incomes, and health care access, but they all had one thing in common: A tuberculosis vaccination programme. In Germany, for example, the BCG immunisation plans were different before the country was unified in 1990. The former East Germany began inoculating children against TB a decade earlier than in the West, meaning more older Germans in the eastern parts of the country were likely to have been given the vaccine. Older people are at greater risk from COVID-19. Based on the data, the researchers estimated that a 10 per cent increase in TB vaccine coverage could lead to a 10 per cent reduction in deaths from COVID-19.
This new study challenges the World Health Organisation's position on the TB vaccine that "there is no evidence" it is effective. This is not the first study into the potential for BCG to protect against COVID-19. BCG, named after French microbiologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin who developed it, contains a live strain of Mycobaterium bovis, which is related to the bacteria that causes TB. The disease, which caused one in seven deaths in America and Europe at the turn of the 20th century, became preventable after the vaccine was introduced in 1921. The BCG vaccine is unique as it can strengthen the innate immune system. Previous studies have found that the vaccine could also give children broad protection against other diseases such as respiratory infections not related to tuberculosis.
(With inputs from Agencies)
