1921 Tuberculosis Vaccine May Help Prevent COVID-19

Trials have begun on a one-hundred-year-old tuberculosis vaccine by UK scientists, to see if it can save lives from the coronavirus.

There has been evidence that the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine, developed to fight tuberculosis in 1921, may be able to protect from other infections, and 1,000 people have been recruited to start human trials at the University of Exeter, according to The Guardian.

Millions of UK adults will have had the BCG jab as a schoolchild, but if the trial results are successful, they will need to be vaccinated again to gain protection.

Any enhanced resilience gained by the vaccine will wane over time, meaning anyone who received the BCG jab in their childhood will not have any protection from the virus. There has not been a routine BCG vaccination programme since 2005 due to the very low levels of tuberculosis.

The design of a vaccine is to train the immune system in a very targeted way to provide lasting protection against a specific infection, however, this process will also cause wide-spread alterations to the immune system.

These changes can then heighten the immune system’s response to other infections. Researchers are optimistic that the BCG vaccine could provide some protection against the coronavirus.

However, even if the results are encouraging, the BCG jab is not intended as a long term solution or cure for COVID-19. The vaccine will not train the immune system to produce the antibodies and specialist white blood cells that would recognise and fight off the coronavirus.

“This could be of major importance globally,” Prof John Campbell, of the University of Exeter Medical School, told the BBC.

“Whilst we don’t think it [the protection] will be specific to Covid, it has the potential to buy several years of time for the Covid vaccines to come through and perhaps other treatments to be developed.”

The Exeter trials are part of a global study that includes Australia, the Netherlands, Spain and Brazil, which involves 10,000 volunteers. The trial will be focussing on health and social care workers who have a greater chance of being exposed to the coronavirus, giving researchers faster results to see if the BCG vaccine is effective.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, is one of the authors of a Lancet article saying the BCG vaccine has the potential to “bridge the gap before a disease-specific vaccine is developed”.

“This would be an important tool in the response to Covid-19 and future pandemics,” the article states.

The main objective is still to develop a vaccine that will specifically target COVID-19, there are currently ten such vaccines in the final stages of clinical research, including the promising Oxford University candidate.

If the BCG trials prove successful, and that the vaccine does provide defence against the coronavirus, it then could provide the world crucial time to develop a more effective and targeted vaccine to ultimately bring the pandemic under control.

It could also be rolled out in the case of future pandemics if it is found to protect against viral infections generally.

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