ArticleCell death & disease2020
BCG vaccination policy and preventive chloroquine usage: do they have an impact on COVID-19 pandemic?
Article in Cell death & disease, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 63 citations in OpenAlex.
- Associations of Medications With Lower Odds of Typical COVID-19 Symptoms: Cross-Sectional Symptom Surveillance Study.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2020Trial
- Article
- Potential treatments of COVID-19: Drug repurposing and therapeutic interventions.Journal of pharmacological sciences · 2023Review
- Safety considerations of chloroquine in the treatment of patients with diabetes and COVID-19.Chemico-biological interactions · 2022Article
- Potential of Microneedle Systems for COVID-19 Vaccination: Current Trends and Challenges.Pharmaceutics · 2022Review
- A global survey in the developmental landscape of possible vaccination strategies for COVID-19.Clinical immunology (Orlando, Fla.) · 2022Review
- Effect of BCG on Respiratory Complications Caused by COVID-19: A Scoping Review.International journal of general medicine · 2022Article
- Article
- Redressing the interactions between stem cells and immune system in tissue regeneration.Biology direct · 2021Review
- The Relationship between COVID-19 Severity and Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG)/Pathogens and global health · 2021Article
- Low level of plasminogen increases risk for mortality in COVID-19 patients.Cell death & disease · 2021Article
- Outcomes among 10,314 hospitalized COVID-19 patients at a tertiary care government hospital in Delhi, India.Journal of medical virology · 2021Article
- Review
- Actively or passively deacidified lysosomes push β-coronavirus egress.Cell death & disease · 2021Article
- The find of COVID-19 vaccine: Challenges and opportunities.Journal of infection and public health · 2021Review
- Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in the prophylaxis and therapy of COVID-19 infection.Biochemical and biophysical research communications · 2021Review
- BCG Vaccine-Induced Trained Immunity and COVID-19: Protective or Bystander?Infection and drug resistance · 2021Review
- COVID-19 Death and BCG Vaccination Programs Worldwide.Tuberculosis and respiratory diseases · 2021Article
- Principles and Challenges in anti-COVID-19 Vaccine Development.International archives of allergy and immunology · 2021Review
- Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG): the adroit vaccine.AIMS microbiology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In the light of its rapid global spreading, on 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization has declared it a pandemic. Interestingly, the global spreading of the disease is not uniform, but has so far left some countries relatively less affected. The reason(s) for this anomalous behavior are not fully understood, but distinct hypotheses have been proposed. Here we discuss the plausibility of two of them: the universal vaccination with Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) and the widespread use of the antimalarial drug chloroquine (CQ). Both have been amply discussed in the recent literature with positive and negative conclusions: we felt that a comprehensive presentation of the data available on them would be useful. The analysis of data for countries with over 1000 reported COVID-19 cases has shown that the incidence and mortality were higher in countries in which BCG vaccination is either absent or has been discontinued, as compared with the countries with universal vaccination. We have performed a similar analysis of the data available for CQ, a widely used drug in the African continent and in other countries in which malaria is endemic; we discuss it here because CQ has been used as the drug to treat COVID-19 patients. Several African countries no longer recommend it officially for the fight against malaria, due to the development of resistance to Plasmodium, but its use across the continent is still diffuse. Taken together, the data in the literature have led to the suggestion of a possible inverse correlation between BCG immunization and COVID-19 disease incidence and severity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.