Tuberculosis vaccine may play role in reducing Covid-19 death rate, study says
- US researchers compared data across the globe, finding places where people were inoculated against TB had lower mortality rates
- Findings are preliminary, and it is not clear why, but they suggest BCG could ‘train’ a child’s innate immune response
Researchers from the 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.
They 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.
“This is remarkable, considering that [these parts of] Latin America have much higher population densities than the North American states analysed, including New York,” co-author Carolina Barillas-Mury wrote in a peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on Tuesday.
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 the former East Germany. And the mortality rate was four times higher in Italy than in Finland.