In new research , investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) show that the 100-year-old Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, originally developed to prevent tuberculosis, protects individuals with type 1 diabetes from severe COVID-19 disease and other infectious diseases. Two back-to-back randomized double-blinded placebo-controlled trials found that the BCG vaccine provided continuous protection for nearly the entire COVID-19 pandemic in the US, regardless of the viral variant. Individuals with type 1 diabetes are highly susceptible to infectious diseases and had worse outcomes when they were infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Published data from other investigators show mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are not very effective in this group of vulnerable patients. But we've shown that BCG can protect type 1 diabetics from COVID-19 and other infectious diseases." Denise Faustman, MD, PhD, senior author, director of the Immunobiology Laboratory at MGH and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School The 18-month Phase III trial, published in iScience , was conducted late in the US pandemic when the highly transmissible Omicron variant was circulating.
A 15-month Phase II trial was conducted early in the pandemic; results of that trial were published in Cell Reports Medicine. During the COVID-19 pandemic, several international trials tested if BCG as a single shot, or booster, given to previously BCG-vaccinated adults protected them from infection and COVID-1.
