ArticleJournal of internal medicine2020
On the relationship between BCG coverage and national COVID-19 outcome: could 'heterologous' herd immunity explain why some countries are better off?
Article in Journal of internal medicine, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sex disparities of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality among patients living with tuberculosis in the United States.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- BCG Vaccination: A potential tool against COVID-19 and COVID-19-like Black Swan incidents.International immunopharmacology · 2022Review
- Spurious early ecological association suggesting BCG vaccination effectiveness for COVID-19.PloS one · 2022Article
- The Natural Effect of BCG Vaccination on COVID-19: The Debate Continues.Frontiers in immunology · 2022Article
- The Relationship between COVID-19 Severity and Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG)/Pathogens and global health · 2021Article
- COVID-19 pandemic: SARS-CoV-2 specific vaccines and challenges, protection via BCG trained immunity, and clinical trials.Expert review of vaccines · 2021Review
- COVID-19 Severity and Neonatal BCG Vaccination among Young Population in Taiwan.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- On the relationship between BCG coverage and national COVID-19 outcome: could 'heterologous' herd immunity explain why some countries are better off?Journal of internal medicine · 2020Article
- Good old BCG - what a century-old vaccine can contribute to modern medicine.Journal of internal medicine · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected most parts of the global society since its emergence, and the scientific community has been challenged with questions urgently demanding answers. One of the early hypotheses on COVID-19 outcome was that some protection could be offered by the tuberculosis vaccine (BCG), and several clinical studies were initiated along with the emergence of numerous observational studies on the relationship between BCG and COVID-19 severity. In the present work, I demonstrate a strong correlation between the number of years that countries implemented BCG vaccination plans and age-standardized mortality rates during the first months of the pandemic in Europe. Further analyses of age groups in two European countries with comparably few confounding factors and easily identifiable groups of BCG-vaccinated and non-vaccinated subgroups suggest a population-level effect of BCG on national outcomes of COVID-19. This phenomenon of 'heterologous herd immunity' deserves further investigation, both in epidemiological and experimental studies.
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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.