Naomi A. van Westen-Lagerweij, Eline Meijer, Elisabeth G. Meeuwsen
Niels H. Chavannes, Marc C. Willemsen, Esther A. Croes
2021 · npj Primary Care Respiratory Medicine
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This was funded (and further publicized) by the tobacco industry and has been debunked many times[1][2][3]. Let's flag it so that we don't further canonize a lie. 1. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/05/417411/smoking-nearly-doub... 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33246296/ 3. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41533-021-00223-1
In the early days of the pandemic it was widely reported (erroneously) that tobacco smoking was protective against SARS-CoV-2. I don't know if OP was thinking along such lines, but it would be understandable if they were. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41533-021-00223-1
No, that appears to be a myth. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41533-021-00223-1 > To date, there is no strong evidence (i.e., evidence based on causal research) that smokers are protected against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Moreover, there is growing evidence that smokers have worse outcomes after contracting the virus than non-smokers.
Interesting that they may have found a physiological explanation for this effect. Just to note: the public health field has not availed itself well on this issue. From the earliest days of the pandemic, it was observed that current smokers were less prone to Covid infection than never/former smokers. This result played out again and again, in literally hundreds [1] of studies across the world. [1] https://twitter.com/phil_w888/status/1279973073811197952 But virtually every time, public health folks would deny that smoking had any protective effect on Covid-19 infection at all. They called it a myth [2], insisted that some sort of statistical bias explained the…
discrepancy, and accused anyone who said otherwise of being in the pay of the tobacco industry [3]. [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41533-021-00223-1 [3] https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1303 I can understand having strong priors like "smoking worsens respiratory disease" that would make one skeptical. I can understand being reluctant to inject any nuance into anti-smoking messages. But eventually you have to concede. Hopefully this is the tipping point. I'm waiting to see how this turns out, but it'd be a real shame if the politics of smoking research meant that we missed out on a prophylactic that was right under our noses the whole time.
I had read about potentially protective effects of nicotine [1], but seems like it was a fluke https://www.nature.com/articles/s41533-021-00223-1 [1] There is even a RCT on this, but no results yet https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04583410
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