LETTER


BCG Vaccine does not Protect Against COVID-19



Mohamed F. Allam1, *, Ghada E. Amin1
1 Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt


Article Metrics

CrossRef Citations:
5
Total Statistics:

Full-Text HTML Views: 1425
Abstract HTML Views: 834
PDF Downloads: 669
ePub Downloads: 354
Total Views/Downloads: 3282
Unique Statistics:

Full-Text HTML Views: 766
Abstract HTML Views: 393
PDF Downloads: 448
ePub Downloads: 207
Total Views/Downloads: 1814



Creative Commons License
© 2020 Allam & Amin.

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.

* Address correspondence to this author at Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt; Tel: + 2 01143559946; E-mail: farouk.allam@med.asu.edu.eg.


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.

Keywords: Antiviral treatments, COVID-19, BCG, Vaccine, Review, Immunity.