Is there evidence that BCG vaccination has non-specific protective effects for COVID 19 infections or is it an illusion created by lack of testing?

  1. Shivendu Shivendu
  2. Saurav Chakraborty
  3. Agnieszka Onuchowska
  4. Ankit Patidar
  5. Arpit Srivastava

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Abstract

The goal of this paper is to showcase that the COVID-19 disease pattern is evolving and to study the relationship between mandatory BCG policy and caseload/million or death/per million. We analyze seven recent publications on the impact of BCG vaccinations on the development of COVID19 illness and extend presented findings using the latest data from April 10, 2020. We analyze data from 98 countries and we extend existing models by adding the dimension of COVID-19-related testing conducted by the analyzed countries. Similarly to prior studies, we find that COVID-19 attributable case and death incidences across countries share a relationship with a country’s BCG vaccination inclusion in the national immunization program when testing is not taken into consideration. However, this relationship vanishes when we add the dimension of testing. We observe that case and death incidences conditional on testing do not get affected by the countries’ BCG vaccination inclusion in the national immunization program. Therefore, we show that there is no statistical evidence to support the assertion that inclusion of BCG vaccination in national immunization program (NIP) has any impact of COVID 19 infections (cases) or mortality.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.18.20071142: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    We used R and Python to perform the analysis and we present our results below.
    Python
    suggested: (IPython, RRID:SCR_001658)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.18.20071142 on medRxiv