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- SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, regularly tests a group of employees for COVID-19 antibodies.
- 4,300 employees signed up for a study on possible links between antibodies and immunity.
- “People can have antibodies, but that doesn’t mean they will be immune,” said one of the study’s authors.
- Visit Insider’s Business section for more stories.
Elon Musk’s space exploration firm, SpaceX, used its employees to conduct a study on COVID-19 antibodies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
The study results were made public in a peer-reviewed article published in Nature Communications, which lists Elon Musk as a co-author.
According to the study, SpaceX sent an email to staff asking for volunteers to participate in a regular antibody study to study COVID-19. After that email was sent, 4,300 SpaceX employees signed up to donate monthly blood samples so they could be tested for antibodies.
According to the Journal, Anil Menon, medical director of Musk and SpaceX, worked to get various doctors and academics to design the study.
The published study includes data ranging from April – when testing began – to June, although regular testing is still ongoing according to the Journal.
The study provides more information on ongoing efforts to understand how COVID-19 works and whether a number of antibodies could provide a level of immunity.
Study results suggest that people who had only mild symptoms of COVID-19 developed fewer antibodies, which could mean they are less likely to have long-term immunity and therefore could be re-infected.
Researchers still working on the study told the Journal that they had previously observed cases of reinfection in workers who previously had low antibody counts.
“People can have antibodies, but that doesn’t mean they will be immune,” said Dr. Galit Alter, one of the study’s co-authors and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “The good news is that most vaccines induce [antibody] levels much higher than these levels, ”added Dr. Alter.
Scientists are still investigating whether capturing COVID-19 provides a lasting form of immunity.
Dr Alter also told the Journal that Elon Musk has a personal interest in the research and asked the study’s authors to educate themselves and SpaceX executives on how vaccines and antibodies work.
SpaceX was able to reuse the medical facilities it had already installed before the pandemic and recruited interns from nearby hospitals to help draw blood from the volunteers. Out of 4,300 volunteers, 120 who tested positive for COVID-19 had their blood examined carefully to see how many antibodies they had produced. Of those 120, 61% reported no symptoms.
Of this sample of 120 people, 92% were men and the median age was 31 years. The largest sample consisted of 84.3% men with a median age of 32 – although the age range ranged from 18 to 71.
Elon Musk himself has said he tested positive for the coronavirus in November of last year and that in the early months of the pandemic, the billionaire has repeatedly expressed his frustration with the lockdown measures on them. calling it “fascists”. At one point, he defied a shelter-in-place order to open his Tesla factory in Alameda County, California, after which several employees tested positive for the coronavirus.
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