More than 4,300 SpaceX employees voluntarily participated in a COVID-19 antibody study compiled in 2020 by CEO Elon Musk.
The study, recently published in the journal Nature communication, shows evidence that infected people who showed milder symptoms had less immunity to COVID-19 than those who became ill from the disease. The group behind the study found evidence to suggest that there is a specific threshold for antibodies that can provide immunity, although they wrote that ‘the exact levels’ […] related to the protection against reinfection remains unclear. ”
Vaccines also produce a much stronger immune response than cases with few to no symptoms, the authors say. They hope this research, and other studies like it, can help policymakers figure out how to effectively distribute limited vaccine supplies.
SpaceX employees were asked by email in April 2020 to be part of the study – exactly around the time Musk spread dangerous misinformation about the virus in the company’s internal emails and on Twitter. In March 2020, Musk emailed SpaceX employees that he believed they were more likely to die in a car accident than to COVID-19, and that he did not see the virus ‘among the top 100 health risks’. the United States is not. State. He also tweeted the same month that there would “probably be close to zero new business” in the US “by [the] end of April. ”
Nearly 500,000 Americans have since died. Musk contracted COVID-19 in November 2020 and said he was experiencing mild symptoms.
The aerospace company has hired its existing medical director – who oversees SpaceX’s emerging human flight program – to work with a Harvard infectious disease expert and a Ragon Institute doctor to develop the antibody test program, according to The Wall Street Journal. A group of 30 co-authors from MIT, Harvard, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Howard Hughes Medical Center, SpaceX and others collaborated on the study. The effort received funding from, among others, the National Institutes of Health, Musk’s own charity, the Gates Foundation’s COVID-19 vaccine accelerator, and NASA’s Translational Research Institute for Space Health.
The employees who reported giving blood samples about every month. The authors of the newspaper note that 92 percent of the volunteers were male and that the average age was 31, which could skew the results. The complete question paper and data set are available free of charge on the Nature website.