Does tetanus vaccination contribute to reduced severity of the COVID-19 infection?

Abstract

We present the hypothesis to the scientific community actively designing clinical trials and recommending public health guidelines to control the pandemic that – “Tetanus vaccination may be contributing to reduced severity of the COVID-19 infection” – and urge further research to validate or invalidate the effectiveness of the tetanus toxoid vaccine against COVID-19. This hypothesis was revealed by an explainable artificial intelligence system unleashed on open public biomedical datasets. As a foundation for scientific rigor, we describe the data and the artificial intelligence system, document the provenance and methodology used to derive the hypothesis and also gather potentially relevant data/evidence from recent studies. We conclude that while correlations may not be reason for causation, correlations from multiple sources is more than a serendipitous coincidence that is worthy of further and deeper investigation.