BCG Vaccine for COVID

[pamojja]

Go figure: I got the BCG vaccine as a toddler, and as a young adult a calcified TBC tubercle on my lung x-ray.

 

[Rebeccare]

Here's another article (neither published nor peer-reviewed yet) on the topic. I also read that Dr. Faustman, the doctor who has been studying this vaccine for years, is hoping to soon start a trial for health care workers in the Boston area.

 

[Hufsamor]

I believe Norway and sweden have had more or less the same kind of vaccination program when it comes to bcg

This is incorrect.

I found something written by the Norwegian health organisation, written in 2008, when they where considering to stop the bcg vaccination program. (Which they did, in 2009.

Norge er det eneste nordiske landet som har BCG- vaksinasjon av lavrisikogrupper som en del av det nasjonale barnevaksinasjonsprogrammet. Sverige sluttet med BCG-vaksinasjon for lavrisikogrupper i 1975, Danmark i 1985 og Finland i 2006. På Island har vaksinen aldri vært brukt i program. En rekke andre vestlige land har i løpet av de siste årene revurdert bruken av BCG-vaksine og sluttet å gi den rutinemessig til lavrisikogrupper.

This states at what year the different countries stopped the bcg vaccination program:
Sweden:1975
Denmark: 1985
Finland : 2006
(Norway: 2009)

For the moment, coronadeaths in those countries are as follows,
number of deaths pr one million citizens:
Sweden: 86
Denmark: 43
Finland: 9
Norway: 20

Sweden has, on the other hand, a very different approach to the outbreak comparing to Norway and Denmark. (I'm not sure about Finland) Norway and Denmark have closed down their countries, more or less, while Sweden are less restrictive.

 

[andyguitar]

The statstics might not be very reliable as we would need to take into account the effect of immigration to Nordic countries from the middle east. All have an active BCG programme so does India and Pakistan.

 

[Rebeccare]

I just read another article today about the potential of both the BCG vaccine and the OPV vaccine (a live version of the polio vaccine) to provide some level of protection against serious symptoms of the coronavirus: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-vaccine-innate-immunity.html

At more than 25 universities and clinical centers around the world, researchers have begun clinical trials, primarily in health care workers, to test whether a live tuberculosis vaccine that has been in use for 99 years called the bacillus Calmette-Guérin, or B.C.G., vaccine, could reduce the risks associated with the coronavirus.

Another small but esteemed group of scientists is raising money to test the potential protective effects of a 60-year-old live polio vaccine called O.P.V.

It’s counterintuitive to think that old vaccines created to fight very different pathogens could defend against the coronavirus. The idea is controversial in part because it challenges the dogma about how vaccines work.

But scientists’ understanding of an arm of immunology known as innate immunity has shifted in recent years. A growing body of research suggests that live vaccines, which are made from living but attenuated pathogens (as opposed to inactivated vaccines, which use dead pathogens) provide broad protection against infections in ways that no one anticipated.

Scientists stress that these vaccines will not be a panacea. They might make symptoms milder, but they probably won’t eliminate them. And the protection, if it occurs, would most likely last only a few years.

In a 2016 review of 68 papers commissioned by the World Health Organization, a team of researchers concluded that B.C.G., along with other live vaccines, “reduce overall mortality by more than would be expected through their effects on the diseases they prevent.”

The W.H.O. has long been skeptical about these “nonspecific effects,” in part because much of the research on them has involved observational studies that don’t establish cause and effect. But in a recent report incorporating newer results from some clinical trials, the organization described nonspecific vaccine effects as “plausible and common.”

The possibility that vaccines could have nonspecific effects is brow-furrowing in part because scientists have long believed that vaccines work by stimulating the body’s highly specific adaptive immune system.

After receiving a vaccine against, say, polio, a person’s body creates an army of polio-specific antibodies that recognize and attack the virus before it has a chance to take hold. Antibodies against polio can’t fight off infections caused by other pathogens, though — so, based on this framework, polio vaccines should not be able to reduce the risk associated with other viruses, such as the coronavirus.

But over the past decade, immunologists have discovered that live vaccines also stimulate the innate immune system, which is less specific but much faster. They have found that the innate immune system can be trained by live vaccines to better fight off various kinds of pathogens.

For instance, in a 2018 study, Dr. Netea and his colleagues vaccinated volunteers with either B.C.G. or a placebo and then infected them all with a harmless version of the yellow fever virus. Those who had been given B.C.G. were better able to fight off yellow fever.

Research by Dr. Netea and others shows that live vaccines train the body’s immune system by initiating changes in some stem cells. Among other things, the vaccines initiate the creation of tiny marks that help cells turn on genes involved in immune protection against multiple pathogens.

Some scientists have raised concerns over whether these vaccines could increase the risk for “cytokine storms” — deadly inflammatory reactions that have been observed in some people weeks after they have been infected with the coronavirus. Dr. Netea and others said that they were taking these concerns seriously but did not anticipate problems. For one thing, the vaccines will be given only to healthy people — not to people who are already infected.

Also, B.C.G. may actually be able to ramp up the body’s initial immune response in ways that reduce the amount of virus in the body, such that an inflammatory response never occurs. It may “lead to less infection to start with,” said Dr. Moshe Arditi, the director of the Infectious and Immunological Diseases Research Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who is leading one of the trial arms.