[nudephil (OP)]

Vivien sent in this question:

There are four main blood groups - A, B, AB, and O - each with different antigen structures. Would it therefore make more sense to develop COVID-19 vaccines specific to blood type? Is any one investigating the relationship between the four main blood groups and the COVID-19 susceptibility? Also has any correlation between the four main blood group profiles and ethnicity been detected, which may explain why BAME people appear to be more affected in this pandemic?

Can anyone help?

[RD]

... which may explain why BAME people appear to be more affected in this pandemic? ...

BAME people are over*represented in the NHS, compared with the UK population as a whole  ....

"The NHS is the largest employer of BME staff in the UK: more than 200,000 health service staff (around a third of doctors and a fifth of nurses and midwives) are from BME backgrounds ..."

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jul/09/nhs-bme-staff-discrimination

So anything which disproportionately effects doctors & nurses in the UK will have a BAME bias, when compared with the UK population as a whole.

[* not a criticism ]

[Bored chemist]

It looks like there's a weak association between ABO status and susceptibility
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.08.20058073v1
Presumably, if it attacked blood cells, rather than lung cells it would make more difference.

Talk of BAME is hilarious in the context of virus survival data from China.

[evan_au]

BAME

If, like me, you have never heard of "BAME", no, it's not a new method of blood typing.
It stands for "Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic".
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_ethnicity_in_the_United_Kingdom#Collective_terms_for_minority_ethnic_groups

Would it ..make more sense to develop COVID-19 vaccines specific to blood type?

Vaccines contain a fragment of a protein that occurs on the surface of the virus.
They cause your body to react against the virus.

You do not want a vaccine to contain a protein which occurs on red blood cells (or any other cell type in your body), as that could trigger an auto-immune attack on the body.

It's hard enough to develop and qualify a vaccine. You don't want to have to qualify and develop 4 different vaccines!

Even if there were some vaccine antigen that was effective only in people with blood types O and B (and potentially lethal in people with blood type A or AB), there is an unacceptable risk of giving this vaccine to someone with the wrong blood type. 

Also has any correlation between the four main blood group profiles and ethnicity been detected,

Yes, populations from different ethnic groups do have different frequencies of the 4 main blood groups. But the same 4 groups exist everywhere.

As a proxy, you can look at blood type by country of origin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type_distribution_by_country

For the purposes of compatible blood transfusion, there are greater differences in the "rare" blood groups between ethnic populations.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_blood_group_systems#Rare_blood_types

[Bored chemist]

It stands for "Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic".

I'd like to think that most of us are aware of it.
Just think about how helpful it is in China (Or Africa, South America, India... essentially everywhere).
To be fair, it's a bloody stupid classification anywhere.
White is the ethnic minority in the world.