BACKGROUND: The Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) tuberculosis vaccine has immunity benefits against respiratory infections. Accordingly, it has been hypothesized to have a protective effect against COVID-19. Recent research found that countries with universal BCG childhood vaccination policies tend to be less affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, such ecological studies are biased by numerous confounders. Instead, this paper takes advantage of a rare nationwide natural experiment that took place in Sweden in 1975, where discontinuation of newborns BCG vaccination led to a dramatic fall of the BCG coverage rate, thus allowing us to estimate the BCG's effect without the biases associated with cross-country comparisons. METHODS: Numbers of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations were recorded for birth cohorts born just before and just after 1975, representing 1,026,304 and 1,018,544 individuals, respectively. We used regression discontinuity to assess the effect of BCG vaccination on Covid-19 related outcomes. This method used on such a large population allows for a high precision that would be hard to achieve using a randomized controlled trial. RESULTS: The odds ratio for Covid-19 cases and Covid-19 related hospitalizations were 1.0005 (CI95: [0.8130-1.1881]) and 1.2046 (CI95: [0.7532-1.6560]), allowing us to reject fairly modest effects of universal BCG vaccination. We can reject with 95% confidence that universal BCG vaccination reduces the number of cases by 19% and the number of hospitalizations by 25%. CONCLUSIONS: While the effect of a recent vaccination must be evaluated, we provide strong evidence that receiving the BCG vaccine at birth does not have a protective effect against COVID-19 among middle-aged individuals.