- Elon Musk’s SpaceX company has regularly tested a group of employees for COVID-19 antibodies.
- 4,300 employees signed up for a study that looks at the 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.
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Elon Musk’s space exploration company, SpaceX, has been using its employees to conduct a study of COVID-19 antibodies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
The results of the study were published in a peer-reviewed article published in Nature Communications, which lists Elon Musk as a co-author.
According to the study, SpaceX sent a round of e-mail to the team 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 provide monthly blood samples so they could be tested for antibodies.
According to the Journal, Musk and SpaceX chief medical officer Anil Menon worked to bring in several doctors and academics to design the study.
The published study includes data from April – when testing began – and June, although regular testing is still ongoing, according to the Journal.
The study provides more information about ongoing efforts to understand how COVID-19 works and whether a number of antibodies can provide a level of immunity.
The study results suggest that people who had only mild symptoms of COVID-19 developed less antibodies, which may mean they are less likely to have long-term immunity and therefore can be reinfected.
Researchers still working on the study told the Journal that they have already seen some cases of reinfection in workers who previously had low antibodies.
“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] much higher levels than these levels, “added Dr. Alter.
Scientists are still researching whether capturing COVID-19 provides some form of lasting immunity.
Dr. Alter also told the Journal that Elon Musk was personally interested in the research and made the study’s authors inform themselves and SpaceX executives about how vaccines and antibodies work.
SpaceX was able to reuse the medical facilities it had set up before the pandemic and recruited inmates from nearby hospitals to help collect the volunteers’ blood. Of the 4,300 volunteers, 120 who tested positive for COVID-19 had their blood tested carefully to see how many antibodies they produced. Of these 120, 61% reported no symptoms.
Of this sample of 120 people, 92% were male and the median age was 31. The largest sample was 84.3% male with a median age of 32 – although the age group ranged from 18 to 71.
Elon Musk himself said he tested positive for coronavirus in November last year and, in the early months of the pandemic, the billionaire repeatedly expressed his frustration at the blocking measures that called them “fascists”. At one point, he defied an on-site shelter order to open his Tesla plant in Alameda County, California – after which several employees tested positive for coronavirus.