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.

user:	haxus_the_great
created:	February 17, 2019
karma:	3