More than 4,300 SpaceX employees volunteered to be part of a COVID-19 antibody study co-authored with CEO Elon Musk in 2020.
The study, which was recently published in the journal Nature Communications, shows evidence that infected people who exhibited milder symptoms developed less immunity to COVID-19 than those who became more ill with the disease. The group behind the study found some evidence to suggest that there is a specific limit on antibodies that can provide immunity, although they wrote that “the precise levels […] associated with protection against reinfection remain unclear. “
Vaccines also produce a much stronger immune response than cases with few or no symptoms, note the authors. They hope that this research, and other studies like this, can help policymakers discover how to effectively distribute limited vaccine supplies.
SpaceX employees were invited by email in April 2020 to be part of the study – right around the time that Musk was spreading misinformation about the virus in company internal emails and on Twitter. In March 2020, Musk told SpaceX employees via email that he believed they were more likely to die in a car accident than with COVID-19, and that he did not see the virus “among the top 100 risks to health in the United States. ”He also tweeted that same month that there would be“ probably almost zero new cases ”in the US for [the] end of April. ”
Almost 500,000 Americans have died since then. Musk contracted COVID-19 in November 2020 and said he experienced mild symptoms.
The space flight company had its current medical director – who oversees SpaceX’s human flight program – working with a Harvard infectious disease specialist and a doctor at the Ragon Institute to develop the antibody testing program, according to Wall Street Newspaper. A group of 30 co-authors in total from MIT, Harvard, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Howard Hughes Medical Center, SpaceX and others collaborated on the study. The effort received funding, among others, from the National Institutes of Health, Musk’s own charitable foundation, the Gates Foundation’s COVID-19 vaccine accelerator and NASA’s Translational Research Institute for Space Health.
Employees who signed up gave blood samples almost every month. The authors of the article note that 92% of the volunteers were male and the average age was 31, which can distort the results. The full article and data set are available for free on the Nature website.