New Delhi: COVID-19 positive cases worldwide hit one million at the beginning of the month and are no closer to a vaccine or no definite cure, medical researchers are scrambling to look for a solution. A study conducted by New York Institute of Technology shows that countries who administered BCG vaccine from the very early days of the vaccine have had a lower mortality number from COVID-19 whereas countries like USA, Netherlands & Italy who had stopped the universal administration of the BCG vaccine have been more severely affected. The study also points out the case of Iran which started the universal administration of the BCG vaccine only in 1984, the deaths in Iran are mostly of the elderly.

Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine is a childhood vaccine that helps protect against a broad spectrum of respiratory diseases like Tuberculosis and meningitis. In countries like China and India, it had been administrated all children since the 1940s and is still continued even today. The BCG vaccine was first administered to a human in 1921, in countries like USA & Netherlands it was never universally administered as a routine vaccine as they were able to effectively detect active diseases through the Mantoux test. Low-income countries like India however administered the BCG vaccine universally and evidence suggests that it has helped reduce many respiratory diseases and even sepsis.



Doctors in India are hopeful yet skeptical of the NYIT study about the BCG vaccine. As the sample is taken does not include countries like Australia and Germany which don’t have a universal BCG immunization program and yet have had lower deaths due to COVID-19. The study also doesn’t take many other factors into considerations like weather and temperatures because tropical countries have had lower morbidity, the health infrastructure of the countries & the innate immunity of the people of low-income countries.

While it may seem like a ray of hope and Netherlands, Australia and United Kingdom’s National Health Service has mandated their doctors to get the BCG vaccine a much larger study would be able to really justify the claims of NYIT study. In the meanwhile, researchers are still working to develop a vaccine for Coronavirus