vaccines in progress

Ravinder Saini
Tribune News Service
Rohtak, April 30

The Pt BD Sharma Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) will begin clinical trials from Friday to test the use of tuberculosis vaccine BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin) to ward off Covid-19.

Fighting the virus

The BCG vaccine contains a live but weakened strain of TB bacteria that provokes the body to develop antibodies to attack the bacteria.

The trials will be done on 175 attendants of Covid patients, including close contacts, doctors, nurses, ward boys and sanitary workers. They will be administered the BCG vaccine and kept under observation for the next 180 days to find out its effect.

Boosting immunity

Unlike other vaccines, the BCG vaccine also boosts the innate immune system

The BCG vaccine — introduced in the 1920s to fight TB — is currently administered to newborn children. Dr Dhruv Choudhry, investigator of the research and head of Pulmonary Medicine at PGIMS, said the BCG vaccine was known to enhance immunity. “The study aims to explore whether or not persons given the BCG vaccine catch coronavirus infection,” he said.

Dr Savita Verma, another investigator, said consent would be taken from Covid patients’ attendants to be involved in the study. Thereafter, their samples would be collected. “They would be administered BCG vaccine if they test negative for Covid,” she said.

COLLEGE STATION, Tex. (KBTX/Gray News) - A Texas A&M University professor believes a widely used tuberculosis vaccine could help mitigate the effects of COVID-19, therefore reducing the hospitalization and death rates related to the virus.


Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp last week offered $2.5 million to make sure the work of Dr. Cirillo can move forward as quickly as possible. (Photo provided by Texas A&M University System)
The Bacillus Calmette-Gu?rin, or BCG, is a vaccine primarily used against tuberculosis. It's also used to treat bladder cancer in the U.S.

As the coronavirus has spread around the world, researchers have noticed that the morbidity and mortality rates were lower in some developing countries where the BCG vaccine is widely used.

Researchers hope to demonstrate that the BCG mitigates the effects of the virus, allowing fewer people to be hospitalized or to die from COVID-19.

Texas A&M is the first U.S. institution in the clinical trial to have federal clearance for testing on humans. Healthcare workers will be the first people eligible for the clinical trial, which is set to begin this week.

"It's not going to prevent people from getting infected," said Jeffrey D. Cirillo, a Regent's Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and Immunology at the Texas A&M Health Science Center. "This vaccine has the very broad ability to strengthen your immune response. We call it 'trained immunity.'

More “striking” evidence has emerged that the BCG vaccine given to counter TB may provide protection against Covid-19 and significantly reduce death rates in countries with high levels of vaccination.

A study of 178 countries by an Irish medical consultant working with epidemiologists at the University of Texas in Houston shows countries with vaccination programmes – including Ireland – have far fewer coronavirus cases by a factor 10, compared to where BCG programmes are no longer deployed.

This translates into a death rate up to 20-times less, according to urologist Paul Hegarty of the Mater Hospital, Dublin.

Their “correlation” study, expected to be published shortly by PLOS journal, is largely a statistical one and comes with caveats because of possibility of confounding factors. But it is more comprehensive than an initial one conducted in New York, which prompted a scaling up of clinical trials on people with Covid-19.

To reduce the possibility of error, the researchers re-evaluated cases during the course of the pandemic and made country-by-country comparisons including between Ireland and the UK, Mr Hegarty said. “We did not expect to see such a marked difference.”

“Over the 15 days, incidence of Covid-19 was 38 per million in countries with BCG vaccination whereas the incidence of Covid-19 was 358 per million in the absence of such a programme. The death rate was 4.28 per million in countries with BCG programmes and 40 per million in countries without such a programme,” he added.

Scientists conclude people cannot get coronavirus twiceA number of reported cases of coronavirus patients relapsing after overcoming the disease were actually due to testing failures, South Korean scientists say.

Researchers at the South Korean centre for disease control and prevention (CDC) now say it is impossible for the COVID-19 virus to reactivate in human bodies.

There have been more than 10,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in South Korea, with 245 deaths - a 2.3% fatality rate, which is lower than the 3.4% average as stated by the World Health Organisation.

A total of 277 patients in the country were believed to have fallen ill for a second time, as had patients in China and Japan.

This prompted concerns that the virus could be mutating so quickly that people were not necessarily immune to catching it again.

However, genetic analyses of the virus have not found any substantial changes which would effectively disguise it from the immune system.

Partially as a result of these reports, the World Health Organisation warned governments against using so-called "immunity passports" to allow people to return to work simply because they have antibodies for the virus.

Immunity passports are a prop

In 1997, when he and Melinda first ventured into public health … they focused on birth control, funding a Johns Hopkins effort to use computers to help women in the developing world learn about contraception. The logic was crisp and Bill Gates-friendly. Health = resources ÷ people. And since resources, as Gates noted, are relatively fixed, the answer lay in population control.

As further discussed in this piece, Gates later came to the conclusion that birth control was not the best approach to achieve the goal of slower population growth, instead realizing that — counterintuitively — a reduction in childhood mortality was the best way to limit population growth:

In society after society, he saw, when the mortality rate falls—specifically, below 10 deaths per 1,000 people—the birth rate follows, and population growth stabilizes. “It goes against common sense,” Gates says. Most parents don’t choose to have eight children because they want to have big families, it turns out, but because they know many of their children will die.

“If a mother and father know their child is going to live to adulthood, they start to naturally reduce their population size,” says Melinda.

Robert Gallo, MD, the Homer and Martha Gudelsky Professor in Medicine and co-founder and director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” today, providing insight into COVID-19 treatments.

Gallo, also co-founder and chairman of the International Scientific Leadership Board of the Global Virus Network, appeared for nearly an hour on the C-SPAN program with host Pedra Echevarria, explaining how the novel coronavirus works and potential treatments and research while answering questions from callers.