New Delhi: A new study has found that tuberculosis vaccine administered in the last 15 years is associated with significantly enhanced COVID-19 results.
Published in the journal Vaccines, the researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem have found that Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) regimes are associated with better COVID-19 outcomes.
As per the research, it is associated with reducing infection rates and death rates per million, especially for people aged 24 or younger who had received the vaccination in the last 15 years.
However, they also found that there was no effect in old people who were administered the BCG vaccine.
Many countries have stopped inoculating their entire population, but some still use BCG widely, they said.
“Our findings suggest exploring BCG vaccine protocols in the context of the current pandemic could be worthwhile,” said Nadav Rappoport from BGU.
“A growing number of clinical trials for testing the efficacy of BCG vaccination have been initiated,” Rappoport said.
In their study, the researchers went through the statistics from 55 countries with populations of over three million. It comprises around 63 per cent of the global’s population.
As the pandemic reached different countries at different dates, they aligned countries by the first date at which the country reached a death rate of 0.5 deaths per million or higher.
The researchers controlled for 23 variables including demographic, economic, pandemic-restriction-related, and country health-based.
BCG vaccine administration was shown to be constantly associated with COVID-19 outcomes across the 55 countries, they said.
