Elon Musk co-authored study on COVID-19 antibodies of SpaceX workers

More than 4,300 SpaceX employees have volunteered to be part of a COVID-19 antibody study co-authored by CEO Elon Musk in 2020.

The study, which was recently published in the journal Nature communications, shows evidence that infected people who had milder symptoms developed less immunity to COVID-19 than those who became sicker from the disease. The group behind the study found evidence to suggest that there is a particular threshold of antibodies that could confer immunity, although they wrote that “the precise levels […] associated with protection against reinfection remains unclear. “

The vaccines also produce a much stronger immune response than cases with few or no symptoms, the authors note. They hope that this research, and other similar studies, could help policymakers figure out how to effectively distribute limited stocks of vaccines.

In April 2020, SpaceX employees were invited by email to participate in the study – around the time Musk was spreading dangerous misinformation about the virus in the company’s internal emails and on Twitter. In March 2020, Musk told SpaceX employees in an email he believed they were more likely to die in a car crash than from COVID-19, and that he did not see the virus being a part of it. of the top 100 health risks in the United States. States. “He also tweeted the same month that there would be” probably close to zero new cases “in the United States” by [the] end of April.”

Nearly 500,000 Americans have died since. Musk contracted COVID-19 in November 2020 and said he was exhibiting mild symptoms.

According to The Wall Street Journal. A group of 30 total 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 charitable foundation, the Gates Foundation’s COVID-19 vaccine accelerator, and the Translational Research Institute for Space Health. from NASA.

Employees who signed up donated blood samples approximately every month. The authors of the article note that 92% of the volunteers were men and the median age was 31, which could skew the results. The full document and dataset are available free of charge on the Nature website.