Countries with Mandatory Policies to BCG Vaccine Register Fewer Coronavirus Deaths

Why has Spain had almost 11,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic while Portugal's death toll barely exceeds 200?

Such a disparity in numbers within the Iberian peninsula is mysterious, but it could in part be explained by the two countries' different use of a vaccine. Not a vaccine against COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus - no such vaccine exists yet, rather it is the decades-old tuberculosis vaccine that seems to offer an explanation.

A new scientific study has discovered a possible correlation between countries where it is mandatory to be vaccinated against tuberculosis, also called "Bacillus Calmette-Guerin" (BCG), and the impact of the new coronavirus.

"We found that countries without universal policies of BCG vaccination (Italy, Netherlands, USA) have been more severely affected compared to countries with universal and long-standing BCG policies", the study's authors wrote.

BCG vaccination policy in different countriesAEP/BCG World Atlas

"There have been reports that the BCG vaccine can produce broad protection against respiratory infections," Gonzalo Otazu, a researcher at the New York Institute of Technology and one of the study's authors, explained on Twitter.

"We looked at the data: countries that never implemented a universal BCG vaccine were being hit hard by COVID-19, with a high number of deaths per capita."

Otazu compared policies in countries where tuberculosis vaccination has been universally applied - where everybody must be vaccinated - and countries where is has not been.

Italy, the country with the highest number of deaths from COVID-19 with 13,915, has never universally applied tuberculosis vaccination.

Japan, which has reported only 63 deaths from coronavirus and...