Project mission
Finding a treatment for COVID-19 will be a long-term and difficult process, and research into vaccines can take many years.
A number of researchers have recently suggested that a century old vaccine BCG can cause a boost of the immune system. Possibly, this could be the reason for the relatively low COVID-19-attributed death rates in countries with long-term universal BCG vaccination policy. A number of clinical trials with BCG have started already, but results will not be available for many months.
We are volunteers who are gathering information of BCG vaccines and COVID-19 mortality rates, to explore whether there is evidence in current data on whether inoculation with the BCG vaccine decreases the mortality rates.
The data that has been gathered here is used as well by an AI hackathon (https://www.kaggle.com/bcgvaccine/hackathon ) with two main tasks:
Extend the BCG World Atlas Database for BCG Vaccine Policies and Practices
"BCG - COVID-19" - Find Insights that Could Help the Clinical Trials
Submission deadline for the hackathon - July 25, 2020
We are looking for volunteers who are willing to help us to gather further information on BCG vaccine and COVID-19 relationship.
Help us to gather information for all ongoing and planned BCG - COVID-19 clinical trials
Help us to gather all scientific papers that are related to potential BCG vaccine impact of COVID-19 mortality.
Help us to update the BCG policy data per country spreadsheet from the latest data from BCG Atlas.
Help us to gather information of BCG vaccine policies for each country by adding a link to webpage with such an information
Help us to gather information for all BCG vaccine strains
Questions?
All questions and comments can be added to the following spreadsheet and if we can, we will try to answer BCG - COVID-19 Questions Spreadsheet
Feel free to join our slack channel (https://bcgvaccine.slack.com/) by clicking on "Join BCG vaccine slack channel" bellow.
You can also contact us on linkedin and other contact details that are listed in Team page.