More than 4,300 SpaceX employees volunteered to be part of a covid-19 antibody study co-authored by CEO Elon Musk in 2020. The study was co-authored by the CEO in 2020.
The study was recently published in the journal Nature communications. It shows that infected people who exhibited milder symptoms developed less of an immunity to covid-19 than those who got sicker from the disease.
Vaccines produce a much stronger immune response than cases with little to no symptoms, the authors say. They hope that this could help policymakers figure out how to distribute limited vaccine supplies effectively.
In April 2020, Musk told SpaceX employees that he believed they were more likely to die in a car crash than of covid-19. He also tweeted that there would’probably close to zero new cases’ in the US’by the end of April’.
Musk contracted covid-19 in November 2020. He said he experienced mild symptoms. Musk said he had mild symptoms nearly 500,000 Americans have died since.
A group of 30 co-authors from MIT, Harvard, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Howard Hughes Medical Center. The effort received funding from the National Institutes of health, Musk’s own foundation, Gates Foundation’s covid-19 vaccine accelerator.