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FORBES | BCG against Coronavirus: Less hype and more evidence, please

By Madhukar Pai

I was born and raised in India. On the day I was born, I am told I got my first jab, a vaccine called BCG (bacille Calmette-Guerin). Kids born in India today still get this vaccine.

This century-old vaccine is suddenly in the news, thanks to a flurry of ecological studies (pre-prints, at this stage) that claim a strong correlation between BCG vaccination and protection against COVID-19. These studies have used the BCG World Atlas that my team developed nearly a decade ago, and updated in 2017. The Atlas is neither perfect nor complete, but it is the only such database.