BCG Tokyo-172: Finally a safe & effective Covid vaccine!

It's a shame it's off patent

To dispel the impression that I may be some kind of anti-vax fundamentalist, I’d like to write pro-vax post for a change. In my series looking at reasons for Japan’s low Covid mortality rate, I mentioned the BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin) hypothesis: childhood BCG vaccination to protect against TB has had the off-target effect of helping to protect the Japanese from Covid.

Why has Japan had so few Covid deaths (Part 4)? Was it immunological factors?

But there has been no definitive evidence to back the hypothesis up. Until now!

The participants in this double-blinded randomised controlled trial were 144 Type 1 diabetics (84 males; 60 females. Median age: 42). 96 were given BCG; 48 a placebo. The trial was held in America, but the BCG strain was BCG Tokyo-172, which is known to be one of the most potent. (In case the name didn’t make it clear enough, that’s the strain the Japanese use.)

All participants were already taking part in an RCT on the effectiveness of the BCG vaccine against Type 1 diabetes that started 30 months prior to the Covid-19 Pandemic. They received two doses at the start of the original trial and a third dose a year later. The RCT for Covid was initiated as a parallel study lasting 15 months: Jan 2020 to April 2021.

So what were the results?

92-100% vaccine efficacy over 15 months in a high-risk group! What the trial lacks in participant numbers, it makes up for with impressive results.

Faustman et al. also compared the two arms in terms of infection and symptom severity for any infectious disease during the trial period. The BCG arm (blue) not only had fewer infections per patient…

…but also milder symptoms with fewer occurrences.

The two arms were also compared with their household members in terms of symptom severity for any infectious disease. The placebo recipients had more severe symptoms than their household members, as you’d expect for Type 1 diabetics. But the BCG recipients had the lowest symptom severity.

These results shouldn’t be too surprising. As Faustman et al. point out,

Over the last 17 years, randomized clinical trials and epidemiology studies have shown that the BCG vaccine protects humans from a multitude of infections, including upper respiratory tract infections, leprosy, malaria, viral, and bacterial infections.

Because the BCG vaccines are primarily used to protect against TB, these results are referred to as “off-target effects”. But they look pretty on-target to me!

So that’s effectiveness. What about safety?

Unlike antigen specific vaccines no BCG-related systemic adverse events occurred in any of the participants during the vaccination time period.

So what’s stopping the governments and pharma companies from swapping mRNA and AVV genetic concoctions for good old BCG Tokyo-172? Well, BCG may be good, but it’s also very old.

The BCG vaccine is a >100-year old vaccine originally developed for tuberculosis protection.

So Albert Calmette can’t make any money repurposing it for Covid, let alone Albert Bourla.

But even if it were still on-patent, the BCG vaccine’s off-target effects don’t appear immediately.

While comparison of infectious adverse events in BCG versus placebo groups during the current trial had a significant Poisson distribution (p=0.004), there was no significant difference in all infections during the pre-COVID trial period (Poisson p=0.46). These data suggest that, just like other reported off-target events of the BCG vaccine, it might similarly take about 2 years after the first vaccine for maximal effectiveness for the platform infectious disease protection.

On the other hand, based on various studies showing neonatal BCG vaccination having off-target effects against various diseases later in life, Faustman et al. suggest “the benefits may last for decades”. Contrast this with mRNA vaccines, which went from “95 percent effectiveness” to “95 days effectiveness”. Obviously, this makes the BCG vaccine potentially less profitable that even Ivermectin, but it does help to explain Japan’s low Covid mortality rate. Faustman et al. explicitly draw this link when discussing the trial’s strengths.

Second, our trial uses a very potent strain of BCG, Tokyo-172. BCG strain differences for other off-target indications are important and this strain of BCG exhibits some of the highest in vitro potency and is highly immunogenic. Indeed it is now appreciated that Japan as a country with mandatory BCG vaccines and one of the oldest populations in the world has remarkable resistance to COVID-19

Just to clarify, Japan doesn’t mandate the BCG vaccine but does give it the highest recommendation.

But Japan’s Covid mortality has been higher in 2022. I guess the BCG vaccine’s off-target effects must have drastically waned this year. But I’m open to other suggestions.