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Review
. 2020 May 11;91(2):207-213.
doi: 10.23750/abm.v91i2.9700.

Stop playing with data: there is no sound evidence that Bacille Calmette-Guérin may avoid SARS-CoV-2 infection (for now)

Matteo Riccò  1 , Giovanni Gualerzi  2 , Silvia Ranzieri  3 , Nicola Luigi Bragazzi  4
Affiliations
Review

Stop playing with data: there is no sound evidence that Bacille Calmette-Guérin may avoid SARS-CoV-2 infection (for now)

Matteo Riccò et al. Acta Biomed. .

Abstract

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, a possible explanation for the high heterogeneity of infection/mortality rates across involved countries was hinted in the prevalence of tuberculosis vaccination with Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG). A systematic review was therefore performed on May 2, 2020. A total of 13 articles were ultimately retrieved, 12 of them as preprint papers. All articles were ecological studies of low quality. Most of them did not include main confounding factors (i.e. demographic of the assessed countries, share of peo- ple residing in urban settings, etc.), and simply assessed the differences among incidence/mortality of COVID-19 with vaccination rates or by having vs. having not any vaccination policy for BCG. Even though all studies shared the very same information sources (i.e. international registries for BCG vaccination rates and open source data for COVID-19 epidemics), results were conflicting, with later studies apparently denying any true correlation between COVID-19 occurrence and BCG vaccination rates and/or policies. As a consequence, there is no sound evidence to recommend BCG vaccination for the prevention of COVID-19.

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Conflict of interest statement

Each author declares that he or she has no commercial associations (e.g. consultancies, stock ownership, equity interest, patent/licensing arrangement etc.) that might pose a conflict of interest in connection with the submitted article

Comment in

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