The great Covid and fags cover-up - Spiked

Study after study shows that smokers are less likely to get Covid.

spiked rather invited trouble by giving it the headline ‘Smoke fags, save lives’, but even with a subtler title it would have been enough to alarm Zuckerberg’s minions, since it discussed the growing evidence that smokers were heavily under-represented in Covid-19 wards.

After a brief burst of incredulous coverage in the spring of 2020, the media soon lost interest in the hypothesis that smokers are less likely to get Covid-19, but dozens of studies have been quietly published in the past two-and-a-half years which confirm it.

Of the 100 studies from around the world, 87 of them show a statistically significant reduction in SARS-CoV-2 infection risk among current smokers as compared to non-smokers.

Some of the studies looked at specific outbreaks of Covid-19, such as on a French aircraft carrier.

Besides, this study adjusted for ‘time spent outside’ and still found that smokers were 68 per cent less likely to get Covid-19.

The few studies looking at vaping have produced mixed results, but an intriguing study from the US found that Covid-19 patients who are smokers had better outcomes in hospital when given nicotine patches.

I’m not claiming that it is a systematic review, although a meta-analysis of 57 studies published in Addiction came to the same conclusion: ‘Current compared with never smokers were at reduced risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection.’ Incidentally, that meta-analysis also found that smokers were not at increased risk of hospitalisation and death if they got Covid-19, although former smokers were (presumably due to underlying health conditions).

If a similar body of evidence showed that smoking increased the risk of Covid-19 (or any other disease) it would have been considered settled science long ago.

And secondly, when a study was published in Thorax claiming that smokers were more likely to get Covid-19.

Equally obvious is the fact that we should see higher rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection among smokers if this study were correct, but we don’t.

The third website is the Thorax study and the fourth website is a World Health Organisation webpage from June 2020, which claims there are ‘no peer-reviewed studies that have evaluated the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection among smokers’?

Google ‘tobacco Covid-19’ and the top listing is a WHO webpage that simply asserts: ‘Tobacco users have a higher risk of being infected with the virus through the mouth while smoking cigarettes or using other tobacco products.’ Below that is a journal article titled ‘Are smokers protected against SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19).

The origins of the myth.’ It claims that there is ‘no strong evidence that smokers are protected against SARS-CoV-2 infection’ and asks ‘how is it possible that such a potentially dangerous claim gained so much attention?’.

Even if you type in the title of my blog post (‘Smoking and Covid-19: a new evidence update’), the Thorax study comes up at number one.

There are arguably no practical applications from the knowledge that smoking (or nicotine) reduces the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

At the start of the pandemic, Public Heath England asserted that ‘smokers with Covid-19 are 14 times more likely to develop severe disease’ based on a tiny study from China in which just five smokers were hospitalised with the coronavirus.

A bunch of studies show that smokers are less likely to suffer from dementia.