Maya Vaishnaw
Department of Immunobiology, Massachusetts General Hospital Laboratory and Harvard Medical School, Boston, United StatesPublications
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Review
BCG for Prevention of COVID-19 in Type 1 Diabetes and Other High-Risk Populations
Author(s): Miriam Davis, Grace Wolfe, Maya Vaishnaw, Willem Kuhtreiber and Denise Faustman*
Bacille-Calmette-Guerin (BCG) is a>100 year-old biological vaccine with versatile contemporary applications. It is still used worldwide to protect against tuberculosis, upper respiratory infections, and childhood mortality. Heralded as the safest vaccine ever introduced, it is given to 120 million newborns each year in developing countries. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and before introduction of COVID-19 vaccines, at least 5 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials were launched to test BCG’s efficacy against primary infection by SARS-CoV-2. One of those trials was expressly for type 1 diabetics, one of the patient populations at high-risk of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19. The trial found that multi-dose BCG was safe and 92% effective versus placebo against SARS-CoV-2 primary infection. BCG recipients also had fewe.. Read More»