LETTER
BCG Vaccine does not Protect Against COVID-19
Mohamed F. Allam1, *, Ghada E. Amin1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2020Volume: 14
First Page: 45
Last Page: 46
Publisher ID: TORMJ-14-45
DOI: 10.2174/1874306402014010045
Article History:
Received Date: 05/6/2020Revision Received Date: 22/8/2020
Acceptance Date: 02/9/2020
Electronic publication date: 26/11/2020
Collection year: 2020
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
A recent article by Jop de Vrieze (March 23, 2020) suggested that BCG vaccine could protect against COVID-19 infections. The arguments were that several European countries, like Italy, Spain, France, and Germany, which are badly affected by COVID-19, and the USA stopped vaccination of the general population by BCG and excluded it from their routine vaccination schedule. Many people started to receive doses of BCG based on that hypothesis even before its confirmation. We think that the BCG vaccine could not protect against COVID-19 because several countries like China and Iran, which are severely affected by COVID-19, still include the BCG vaccine in its routine vaccination schedule. Other arguments include that the BCG vaccine improves cell-mediated immunity with little effect on humoral immunity; Immunity against viruses, in general, is mainly humoral.