The studies do appear to show that smoking cigarettes is correlated with a lower probability of getting the Covid, for a lot of different definitions of "getting the Covid."
They also appear to be, by eyeball aggregate, inconclusive as to whether the risk of dying from the Covid is higher or lower for smokers: it's certainly worse to be a smoker than not if you do catch the Covid.
Smoking also has some other bad health effects. I feel like that's pretty well-understood these days. I know these things; I was a smoker; I still am a smoker. I would not recommend taking up a cigarette habit just because of the Covid. Doesn't seem to cut down on the risk of dying from the Covid, still increases the risks of having bad health effects from everything else that's harmful about smoking.
> The studies do appear to show that smoking cigarettes is correlated with a lower probability of getting the Covid
The problem is that non-smokers is not a single category of people, so the confounding factor for the correlation is "why X does not smoke".
For example, if you had a study which compared moderate drinkers to non-drinkers, but not carve out "cannot drink due to other medication" from the second group, you get a more discriminatory result from the study. The real problem of course is that confounding factors are almost fractal in nature.
On the other hand, if you had a comparison saying "Smokers replace their mucus linings more frequently than non-smokers, expectorating the virus with it", then that I would buy as a causation. Coughing up phlegm does offer a direct means of explaining a reduced exposure.
> I would not recommend taking up a cigarette habit just because of the Covid
So there's a weird thing that happens when news about a new improvement in life comes up.
A study gets published "people who eat dark chocolate live longer", but then a bunch of relatively unhealthy but optimistic people actively choose to eat dark chocolate or drink red wine or whatever new superfood, but fail to live longer as a result. Mostly because they just made that one change, plus there are now a thousand more manufacturers of the same product (say Manuka honey), with varying fades of quality as time goes on.
So a change in human behaviour is triggered by a study both for consumption and production, which ends up proving that the original study modified the circumstances in which it was originally true. And we are in the quest for a better causation of the original observation.
> For example, if you had a study which compared moderate drinkers to non-drinkers, but not carve out "cannot drink due to other medication" from the second group, you get a more discriminatory result from the study.
This is in fact what seems to have been underneath all those studies 10-25 years ago that seemed to show that non-drinkers have worse health outcomes than moderate drinkers. The problem is that "non-drinkers" includes a lot of people who can't drink because they're already sick or because they're alcoholics and drug addicts with long histories of abuse (and so on).
Once you control for that group non-drinkers do better than moderate drinkers.
Oh really? That sounds super plausible. Do you have a good source for that? I'd love to dig a bit deeper on this as the whole "drinking once a day is good" thing is something that comes up a lot.
From what I understand, it's hard to know exactly how non-drinkers are different (besides not drinking), but the nail in the coffin for the moderate drinking-endorsing studies which tried to correct for all the factors they could think of, was the rise of Mendelian randomization studies.
Some people have gene variants that interfere with alcohol digestion, effectively making hangovers come much faster and harder. Because these people drink less than other people for a well-understood reason, and are otherwise like everyone else (the gene variants are well mixed into the populations where they occur), it can be used as a causal wedge to pry apart the health contribution from alcohol from the contribution of basically anything else.
And when they did this, the supposed health benefits of alcohol, which were already smaller the more reasonable things you controlled for, vanished entirely.
You can look up meta studies of Mendelian randomization studies on alcohol use on Cochrane and so on of if you want to dig deeper into it.
There has been some pushback, trying to argue that if you don't assume the effect of alcohol to be linear (I.e, don't assume a normal dose-response relationship as you would by default on pretty much anything else), then there's too little data to tell. I don't buy that, as you can probably guess.
> For example, if you had a study which compared moderate drinkers to non-drinkers, but not carve out "cannot drink due to other medication" from the second group, you get a more discriminatory result from the study.
Yeah. From what I remember about these studies is that people who used to smoke but don't anymore actually have higher risk of contracting severe Covid. This is easily explained by the fact that many people who quit smoking do so due to health reasons (which in turn are the cause for higher risk of Covid).
There is no such thing as a confounding factor for a correlation. It only matters for causality.
I will continue to maintain that, given this evidence amidst the existing evidence that smoking is not good for you, you should not start smoking for reasons related to health risks from the Covid.
> There is no such thing as a confounding factor for a correlation.
Sure there is.
As an example, let's say there's a positive correlation between the dose of some antidepressant and the probability of suicide. There could be a confounding variable with respect to the severity of depression in those samples such that people with more severe depression are more likely to take larger doses and more likely to commit suicide. The original correlation may not necessarily be between the dose of the antidepressant and the probability of suicide, but rather the severity of the depression and the probability of suicide. In other words, the correlation could be a correlation of the wrong thing because you didn't control for depression severity.
It does not matter only for causality, but also for correlation. In both cases, it's important to control for confounding variables so that you're measuring and analyzing the actual variable(s) that you're trying to, not some other variable(s) (i.e., confounding) indirectly. Otherwise, it may no longer be a relationship, whether causal or correlative, of the thing you think it is, but of some other thing.
In your example, the positive correlation between the dose of the antidepressant and the probability of suicide still exists in the data.
What you're describing is sampling bias: the correlation between the antidepressant and probability of suicide in the sample may not reflect a similar correlation in a larger population.
> In your example, the positive correlation between the dose of the antidepressant and the probability of suicide still exists in the data.
Of course it does because the confounding factor of depression severity wasn't controlled for. You can't always control for confounding variables after the fact.
> What you're describing is sampling bias: the correlation between the antidepressant and probability of suicide in the sample may not reflect a similar correlation in a larger population.
Yes and no. I am describing sampling bias, but that's because the sampling bias is the source of the confounding variable in my example. The point was that the correlation was supposed to represent the relationship between antidepressant dosage and probability of suicide, not the relationship between people who typically take antidepressants and their probability of suicide. In my example, the dosage ended up being a dependent variable along with the probability of suicide and the severity of depression ended up being the independent variable, when the dosage was supposed to be the independent variable.
Equally we have many studies showing that vitamin D helps to reduce risk from covid (hint: it doesn't).
More studies show that ivermectin has a positive effect in covid patients. In fact, ivermectin has no effect or has only a very weak effect in certain patients.
In medicine observational studies suffer from certain problems that are hard to overcome. The biggest is that the groups are not equal. For example, smokers die younger. Covid risk increases exponentially with age. Consequently, covid will kill more people who have reached greater age as a result of not smoking. The researchers may think that they control for these factors but in reality it is very hard to do.
Not much evidence in either way, but before we study for reasons how smoking could protect from covid, we would like to know for sure that this is really true.
It’s easy to be confidently wrong with statistics.
Ivermectin improves outcomes in a hospital setting… but only in developing nations.
There’s two confounding effects there! One, you have to be sick enough to be treated in hospital and two, living in a place with high levels of endemic parasite infections.
Ivermectin treats parasites. Parasites are helped by the steroids given for severe infections. Treating the parasite infections does -- demonstrably -- help outcomes, but not uniformly. It's not a prophylactic and it won't do much of anything in developed nations where less than 1% of the population has parasites.
I noticed just how bad these studies were when I took Tamiflu for the worst flu I had ever had. I went from crying in pain to "this feels like a mild sniffle" in less than 12 hours, the fastest I had ever experienced flu symptoms subsiding.
My doctor recommended against taking Tamiful because it was expensive (not really) and that studies showed that its effects were marginal, something like reducing the duration of symptoms by a mere 1/2 a day out of 2-3 weeks.
Reducing the duration... reducing the duration. You see, there's no objective method for measuring symptom severity, so during studies of new medications, they don't. They measure duration. But duration is very difficult to reduce, because of the way the learning process of the immune system works. There's a bunch of sequential processes that occur sequentially.
Tamiflu reduces symptom severity but not duration. So apparently it's "worthless", because it improves only outcomes that aren't measured.
Whether you're crying in pain or not is apparently not objective enough...
> Ivermectin improves outcomes in a hospital setting… but only in developing nations.
Precisely. The only studies I could find that were well done and did show correlation were in developing nations. Turns out that having parasites + a severe viral infection can be bad for you.
However, most intestinal parasites are cleared with a much lighter regimen that many ivermectin advocates were suggesting, some with megadoses that are harmful to the liver. There are other dewormers that are much better - some are even single dose.
There are plenty of studies that have participants rate the severity of their symptoms based on some questionnaire inputs. That they didn’t do it on Tamiflu isn’t reflective of an inability to gather that data, it’s just reflective of the fact that it wasn’t gathered.
And, of course the results aren’t totally objective, but absolute objectivity isn’t needed in all circumstances, particularly not when we have no objective way to measure a thing.
> Tamiflu reduces symptom severity but not duration. So apparently it's "worthless", because it improves only outcomes that aren't measured.
To be fair, that's not really "being confidently wrong with statistics" so much as "being confidently wrong by ignoring all of the statistics that are inconvenient to collect".
> But duration is very difficult to reduce, because of the way the learning process of the immune system works. There's a bunch of sequential processes that occur sequentially.
I'm genuinely very curious for more detail about this. Can you describe what some of the processes are (or better, where I can go to learn about it)?
I read about this process in the Immune book by Dettmer.
Your dendritic cells are specialized to ingest pathogens, rip them apart with peroxide, then push their broken parts into cellular windows all over the dendritic cell's surface.
The dendritic cell is also traveling in the lymph system while this is going on, and upon arrival at a lymph node it searches for a t-cell that matches some part that it is presenting. Once a t-cell is found that matches, that cell activates and clones thousands of copies.
Half of the clones go towards the problem sites (where they trigger "ultra killer mode" on macrophages, among other things), and half stay behind to find and activate b-cells, which will then produce antibodies.
> Equally we have many studies showing that vitamin D helps to reduce risk from covid (hint: it doesn't).
But we know the reason for this; in order to get the circulatory and anti-viral benefits of vitamin D, you need to be exposed to a sufficient amount of UVA. But most folks who are getting a sufficient amount of UVA are also getting enough UVB to make enough vitamin D in the first place, which is what always causes the outcomes of the studies to look equivocal. It's really not that complicated, but researchers keep running fake studies to scam money out of the government and make pharma drugs look more effective by comparison.
I'm sure I'm just misunderstanding, but I don't follow the explanation. What do UVA and UVB have to do with this, and why does that lead to weird results?
The reason covid is dangerous is because it binds overly tightly to your ACE2 receptors on the cells in your endothelium and damages them, and when enough of these receptors are damaged the cells die. This can cause all sorts of issues like autoimmune cascades, blood clots, dysregulation of blood pressure and heart rate, etc.
The reason vitamin D is protective is because when you're exposed to UVA, the vitamin D acts as an enzyme that your body uses to produce nitric oxide in your skin and capillaries. Nitric oxide is directly antiviral, but even more importantly it upregulates your ACE2 receptors. With more ACE2 receptors there is less damage caused when some of them are destroyed, which means you are less at risk for blood clots, problems with your heart and blood pressure, deadly autoimmune cascades, etc.
Basically being exposed to UVB causes your body to produce vitamin D, but once you have the vitamin D you need exposure to UVA for your body to produce nitric oxide, which is what causes the health benefits.
The reason smoking is beneficial for covid btw is because nicotine also upregulates the density of your ACE2 receptors. And the reason women are less likely to die is also, you guessed it, because they have more ACE2 receptors.
Aside from vitamin D, you can also obviously upregulate your ACE2 receptors by taking any other food that causes your body to produce more nitric oxide, and/or by taking any ACE inhibitor. OTC things in this category include garlic and hawthorne, and most of the other foods that are commonly used to lower blood pressure.
We have many studies showing that hypovitaminosis D is correlated with the risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms. What's not clear is whether there is a direct causative relationship, or if higher blood vitamin D levels are just a proxy for other generally healthy lifestyle factors.
Some studies have shown a protective effect from vitamin D supplementation and others have not. The general flaw in most of those studies has been that they gave all of the study patients the same dosage instead of titrating the dosage to hit a target blood level. There are huge variations between individuals based on sunlight exposure, diet, genetics, and other pathologies so the data is really noisy.
Before making any claims in this area I recommend reading through at least the abstracts of all studies indexed on this page. It's a complex area and we have no definitive conclusions yet.
There is very good evidence that vitamin D in general helps your immune response. It may be that there is a second factor here (another commenter suggested that UVA light was also involved in this process), but the evidence in favor of boosting your immune response by getting sunlight every day is pretty conclusive.
I would be surprised if this study was a vindication of vitamin D, though, rather than a false positive. I think smoking has been shown to generally have negative effects on your overall health (and immune system).
> generally have negative effects on your overall health
smoking tobacco for years, every day, definitely changes your body. Most of those effects are not great in the long run, yet many people start and continue to smoke cigarettes for years on end. The change to lung tissue, mucus membranes, tongue, mouth ecosystem.. are real.. and for an otherwise healthy person, yes, they have to get "tougher".
Vitamin D is obviously necessary, mostly for bone health, but any study of supplementing it for other purposes to people without any symptoms of deficiency have been disappointing.
Because people did a bunch of small, poor-quality studies that seeded to show improvement. But when we did larger scale, properly controlled, randomized studies, where we gave people vitamin D, it didn't show much of an effect.
And yet people persist in different theories why it is so. I don't know the mechanism, but randomized, placebo-controlled studies currently are gold standard in medicine. Their results are much more trustable than many observations studies. Sometimes we cannot do randomized studies and observational studies is all we can do but if if we can and research report only observational studies, I take with a big dose of salt.
People just stand farther away from smokers, even outdoors. Because smokers stink. And if your having trouble breathing cause of the Covid, you will go to even greater lengths to not get close to smokers.
But also, people with chronic respiratory problems, ie pretty much all smokers, you won’t notice you have mild Covid. Everyday of being a smoker is like having mild Covid, so less likely to get tested etc.
Lastly smokers are on average lower IQ, lower SES, etc. very hard to control for that health research. I think we do know that lower SES communities were less likely to seek health care including vaccines and testing.
> Results: Lower IQ measured at ages 18 to 20 was weakly associated with increased prevalence of smoking, independently of indicators of mental illness and social misbehavior measured in late adolescence. By contrast, smoking cessation later in life among those who smoked at ages 18 to 20 was not associated with IQ. Among smokers, lower IQ was significantly associated with a lower level of smoking after adjusting for other factors.
> Conclusion: Low IQ was associated with an increased prevalence of smoking in adolescence. However, the main part of this association disappeared after adjustment for measures of mental health and social function in early life. IQ was not associated with likelihood of quitting smoking.
After being given this information, a reasonable person would conclude that while smoking might decrease their risk of getting COVID, starting a smoking habit (possibly leading to addiction) would mean likely worse health outcomes than just accepting the risk of getting COVID (which can be lowered significantly through much safer means).
Unfortunately, there are lot of unreasonable people out there. I would not be surprised if a ton of people, if they were to hear the WHO or CDC agree that smoking reduces the risk of COVID infection, would start smoking, and get addicted. Some of those who were already addicted and were trying to quit would decide to stop trying.
The issue is that this information seems to have been suppressed, censored, and outright lied about by authorities. Now, on one hand, I get it: organizations like the WHO and CDC are not only interested in the raw outcomes of trials and research, but are also responsible for influencing public health policy. I think it's pretty safe to say that telling people smoking helps protect from COVID would be against public health goals.
I honestly don't know where I stand on this. I think I'm fine with orgs like the WHO and CDC deliberately not making recommendations on, or being silent about, things that they don't believe are healthy to encourage. But outright lying, denying the results of trials that do prove a correlation, crosses the line for me.
Agree, with the nuance that I think the psychology at WHO / CDC / etc is probably focused on existing smokers who may choose not to (try to) quit because of data like this ("WHO says I should keep smoking!")
But there are going to be misinterpretations and bad outcomes no matter what. So I'd err on the side of honesty and integrity, and perhaps trying to mitigate harm by producing data on, say, life expectancies for smokers who quit today versus those who don't, and (presumably) the data that says it's still way better to quit. And if the data doesn't support that, well, data is data.
No they wouldn't. Smoking gives a little protection against infection, but once you have it it's likely much worse. Vaccines give you a little protection against infection and also reduce the probability of severe courses of illness.
It seems controversial even saying this, and a bit absurd… But I am a heavy smoker and have somehow managed to dodge Covid so far. It is probably coincidence, but I would love it to be studied into more no matter how inconvenient it may be…
I'm a non-smoker but use nicotine daily. My mother (nicotine free) died of COVID, but I have never had it. But we are mere anecdotes, and prove nothing.
It would be interesting to see what impact nicotine tablets had on infection outcomes.
A longer-term study on dementia would also be helpful.
Nicotine is expressed by plants as a pesticide, but the effect on humans is obviously more nuanced. There might be beneficial effects, especially if the delivery mechanism does not involve setting anything on fire.
Also, I'd imagine the people who were smoking when COVID started being a thing were smokers well before then.
So whatever factors make smokers less likely to contract COVID may be because of some of the long term effects of smoking. So picking up smoking isn't necessarily going to make you immediately safer.
One doesn't actually need to smoke cigarettes -- mixing my own vape juice (no flavours, tuned pg/vg and nicotine levels no one dictates) works just fine.
Edit: in any case rolling tobacco is way better than any cigarette one can buy (not to mention 36mg Indonesian killsticks)
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
This story is trying way too hard to be controversial, starting with the incorrect claim that “back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’”. His recounting of his personal Google search results is an amusing anecdote but it’s just showing his search history - the same search without a Google cookie turns up a couple of recent peer-reviewed studies which found smokers had higher risks of complications from infections.
The actual topic is more interesting than the framing: it’s been observed since pretty early on and covered in both conventional and social media but there wasn’t a firm explanation, and nobody sane was going to recommend taking up smoking as a preventative measure so it’s unclear what other coverage the author expected.
> the incorrect claim that “back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’”.
This is a not an incorrect claim, it is a correct claim.
Both the original SARS and coronaviruses in general are known to spread via droplets in the air, and from the beginning folks assumed this was one way SARS-COV-2 spread.
What was unknown was how long the virus could remain viable after the droplets landed on surfaces. If it is a long time, then mishandling a soiled mask could easily undo any benefit of wearing it. This is the same reason people were washing their groceries and mail. We now know that is spreads very poorly this way, so we wear masks and we don’t wash our groceries anymore.
It was apparent very early that there were spread patterns only explainable by aerosols. The Diamond Princess was the earliest publicized example, with cases occurring onboard despite isolation in cabins. Japanese experts understood the lesson immediately and implemented a "three C's" approach to counter airborne spread: avoid close contact, closed spaces, and crowds.
Western governments and experts and the WHO instead took a "lalalala I can't see this" and to this day many still deny airborne transmission and advocate droplet and fomite precautions.
There was not in fact any great mystery about aerosol spread unless you were positively convinced it was impossible. The early tech fact checking was based on this denial, rather than a good faith uncertainty.
While it took way way way too long for the scientific community to recognize airborne spread, it's hard to say that stuff like Diamond Princess could ONLY be explained by airborne spread. It was early in the pandemic, the disease was poorly understood. It's hard to know if the quarantine was effective--passengers could have continued socializing, sick workers distributing food may have been spreading it, etc.
It's a big leap from a single data point.
The more damning issue is that the assumption that it wasn't airborne in the first place wasn't really well founded.
> While it took way way way too long for the scientific community to recognize airborne spread
I would make that more specifically as referring to the Western public health establishment, especially the CDC and WHO. Actual scientists were comfortable saying recognition was overdue fairly early on, reaching the point in July 2020 where a large group published an open letter:
Ok, best explained. If you had no prior bias, airborne spread was most likely cause for Diamond Princess pattern. Western society and WHO had a 100 year prior bias against accepting that respiratory diseases spread via the air.
It all comes back to the victory of germ theory over miasma theory. Germ theory is accurate but people got overzealous. Not all germs need be fomites.
Just to be clear, I am not in any way defending the CDC’s botching the understanding that COVID’s primary means of spreading is airborne. I just remember reading about this on social media, including Zeynep’s many posts, without ever seeing those moderated. Given the general tenor of this post, I suspect that the author might have been lumping reasonable claims many experts supported in with more speculative claims.
The screw-up the title refers to is that the medical definition of the droplet/aerosol threshold has been wrong for most of a century, and the source only just tracked down in late 2020/early 2021.
Also buried in there is an interesting tidbit that experts resist aerosol spread in general because it's too similar to the long-discredited miasma theory, so each virus has had to individually be proven in a lab to have aerosol spread before it's acceptable to say so.
This is true but a more subtle distinction about size of droplet.
If the virus spread primarily by aerosols then cloth and surgical masks would have little preventative value. But we know that they do have preventative value.
The reality as understood today is a mix of droplet sizes. Larger droplets carry more load and hence more risk but work over a smaller radius. But smaller droplets can carry enough load to infect; especially since later variants seem more infectious (i.e. require a smaller load to gain a foothold).
Not so. Surgical masks still filter about 50-60% of aerosols. They are made of similar material to N95 masks, only issue is fit.
A 50-60% reduction has substantial effects! There's been a lot of "perfect is the enemy of the good, and the good is useless" in this pandemic, but we know that 100% of people do not get instantly infected when exposed, so dropping levels by half will have a substantial impact, especially if the infected source wears such a mask too
The issue of an airborne disease is not just a matter of droplets, but whether infectious particles are aerosolized such that they hang in the air for hours. The 6 feet social distancing rule only makes sense in the context of droplet based, non-aerosol transmission. It was only after more than a year into the pandemic that CDC acknowledged that COVID is airborne and updated their guidance.
“Airborne” and “aerosols” are not synonyms. You’re right about aerosols but the question above is whether we knew that the virus traveled in a manner that a mask could interfere with. That includes short-range droplets, not just aerosols.
We knew very early on that droplets were likely and that masks could block many droplets. The question was whether the mask would itself become a major vector in the process.
No, the question was whether it was droplet or aerosol. Experts insisted on droplet even though evidence pointed at aerosol, and cloth and surgical masks don't block aerosols, the particles are too small. That's what people are referring to when they say "masks don't work".
Do you have any citations? I saw both of those claims being discussed heavily on Twitter and Facebook during that time without those disclaimers so if there was some campaign it appears to have been pretty limited.
Anecdata but the more "official" covid subreddits /r/coronavirus and then /r/covid19 started off pretty free speech but then began bringing in more and more moderation and allowing less divergence from agreed upon narrative, if parent poster is a heavy Reddit user perhaps that is where their feelings come from.
> Anecdata but the more "official" covid subreddits /r/coronavirus and then /r/covid19 brought started off pretty free speech but then began bringing in more and more moderation (...)
Aren't you talking about the growth in conspiracy nuts fabricating all sorts of conspiracy theories and assorted loony claims, such as the infamous "covid is caused by 5G" idiot fest, which were flooding covid-related forums?
Are we now expected to turn a blind eye to all the sadly avoidable deaths that conspiracy nuts and antivaxxers with their bullshit claims brought upon the world in the last couple of years? I mean, countless people ended up queuing veterinarian supply stores to gargle on horse dewormer thanks to these morons. Depicting these loonies as innocent truth-seekers that just asked questions and fought conspiracies is intellectually dishonest.
That could definitely explain something like that - basically upgrading some random Reddit moderators to “Big Tech”, and substantially broadening the perceived scope.
The policy was first applied in May 2020 so it wouldn't have been relevant during most of the period in question but even if it had, the examples do not make it seem like they'd be going after someone who said that an N95 would protect you against COVID-19.
Part of why I asked for specific examples is that a common problem you'll see in alternative health circles is where someone will say something which isn't completely wrong in the middle of a bunch of blather which is, and then when they're moderated they'll claim that the former was the reason and a bunch of people will hear that claim without the full original context.
Given that YouTube is region aware, why is it stupid? Just index to whatever the local health authority says and show only items which agree with that.
It’s stupid because there is a pretense they are defending the truth, while the difference between what local authorities claim make it plainly obvious there either is no truth or if there is a truth it can’t ever be what half of the authorities are saying and thus what YouTube is defending.
And that’s of course just an example the dumb anti science stance of forbidding disagreement with the ‘scientific’ status quo, it really puts YouTube in the position of the church silencing Galileo. The church was as sure they were right as are those local authorities.
The actual reason is probably unrelated to the act of smoking. Smokers are different than the general population in a number of ways
- Smokers are addicted to an appetite suppressant and are skinnier than the general population. Since obesity is linked to poor covid outcomes that could play a role.
- I'd guess that smokers are younger on average since, grimly, they don't make it into old age as often (or they quit). Age is also linked to poor covid outcomes.
- Smokers spend more time outdoors and are more likely to sit outdoors at restaurants/bars.
It's definitely an interesting statistical effect but I don't think there's any actionable information in the correlation.
Isn't this not actually what the user you are responding to was saying? Smokers have worse outcomes, but they seem to get it less. All of your points address better outcomes, with the exception of the outdoors bit.
I don't think this has been particularly ignored - in epidemiology circles, the reaction, by and large was "Huh. That's weird - I wonder why that is?"
But it's also not particularly actionable. In terms of a modifiable intervention, "Quick, everyone take up smoking!" is a horrible idea, so it remains in the domain of "A scientific curiosity, and a rare 'W' for one of the worst voluntary health risks one can have."
Are you sure nicotine is the active ingredient here that's mitigating the COVID? It's certainly what smokers crave but the COVID virus could be affected by some other part of the smoke.
Sure? I am sure of very little. My priors (i.e. my physical model) favor the theory that nicotine prevents infection by blocking ACE2 receptors. I have no posterior inferences to confirm or refute the hypothesis.
Smokers crave something else than nicotine. It is just a convenient boogeyman. There are studies where tobacco addicts are given the choice between getting nicotine intravenously or smoking denicotinized cigarettes. An overwhelming majority prefers smoking denicotinized cigarettes.
> many associations with harm are confounded by past or present tobacco use [...] but when pure nicotine is examined [...] the harms appeared minimal: like all stimulants, nicotine may raise blood pressure somewhat, and is addictive to some degree, but the risks do not appear much more strikingly harmful than caffeine [...] There is little evidence from the NRT [nicotine replacement therapy] literature that ‘never-smokers’ like myself are all that likely to become highly addicted
(To be clear, I understand why the medical community would be hesitant to endorse this without it rising to the level of a "cover-up," but it seems like it's not as bad an idea as it intuitively sounds. But it's also unclear if the stimulant levels mentioned in that article are anywhere close to the levels relevant for covid.)
Tobacco addiction stems from psychoactive ”nicotine boosters” both preexisting in the tobacco plant as well as intentionally added to commercial cigarettes. Pure nicotine is not significantly habit-forming by itself. Just don’t combine it with coffee.
Desperation. Acetyl aldéhydes in tobacco are highly addictive. Nicotine supplements do not supply these, but folks manage to quit tobacco using them because they are motivated, and they are the best available alternative.
This thread will surely devolve into a general repository for COVID contrarian angst, but the broader point in this article is an interesting one. I would summarize it by saying there's an asymmetry in evidence demanded for a claim based on whether or not it agrees with the conclusion obtained by reasoning from first principles.
The author seems to be saying that rigorous, peer-reviewed, observational studies should be the end of the discussion, or at least the starting point. I'm not sure I agree. Given the significant limitations present in all medical studies like this, I think it could make some sense to give a lot more weight to the conclusion reached through a fundamental understanding of how the human body works. Some hesitancy to overturn that conclusion based on a handful of inevitably flawed studies seems prudent to me, or at least not crazy.
I'm reminded of the current tensions around "evidence-based practice" where medicine is transformed into essentially flowcharts that get continuously updated according to peer-reviewed research. It sounds like a good idea, but it's been somewhat controversial since that's not how medicine has traditionally been practiced. It significantly reduces a doctor's ability to problem solve through reasoning, which has some benefits but also some clear downsides as well.
Ignore the data and what we are seeing and move back into a more basic incorrect model we feel safe in? The world isn't flat even though it maybe politically incorrect to tell the church this. The downsides here are political.
If the data that agrees with you is "good data", and the data that disagrees with you "needs to reach a higher standard", that is how inaccurate beliefs get entrenched.
If you told me that you saw the sun rise in the east this morning, I'd probably believe you.
If you told me that you saw the sun rise in the north this morning, I'd probably not believe you.
In both cases, "the data is the data," and all I have is your report. However, given a strong prior probability based on personal experience and first-principles reasoning, in the second case above I'm still more likely to think you mistaken than the conventional cosmological model wrong.
I wish it was that simple, but it's not. Data has flaws and limitations and is subject to interpretation. This isn't like math where we can prove the answer to a question is true with absolute certainty.
Since the interactions of ACE2 and nicotine are well-known, my priors favor the benefit of nicotine in this pandemic. They remain neutral, consequently, with regard to smoking, because while smoking does deliver nicotine, it also does lung damage with heat and particulates, and delivers carcinogenic and oxidative creosotes.
The thing that bugs me is that instead of taking the well-known interactions of ACE2 receptors and nicotine as a starting point and looking at how nicotine binds to the ACE2 receptor and trying to find something less addictive to take it's place they just sweep it under the rug for whatever reason.
What makes you think “they” are not researching ACE2 binding agents? Have you actually searched for studies & research, or are you posting lazy conspiratorial blarg?
I immediately check out whenever someone says "Google it and see what comes up" as "evidence" proving some conspiracy. Also, this is weird hill to die on. This dude has amassed a mega-blog post with a ton of aggregated studies - it's not a small amount of work.
Anecdotally my only family member who regularly smokes just got COVID.
The author has spent his entire career attacking anti-smoking campaigns both as an author and the reason why the Institute for Economic Affairs was Big Tobacco's favourite think tank, so assembling this sort of list of "evidence" is par for the course for him.
Back in the day when "long COVID" was an unknown phenomenon and vaccines a dim and distant dream, the medical profession had already spotted the interesting correlation and started nicotine supplement trials (anecdotally, my very non-scientific experiment with nicotine patches for lagging symptoms showed no evident effect). It's possible there's been a massive coverup, but it's also possible the health professionals reasoning just wasn't as highly motivated to see success in these trials and an absence of confounding data as Christopher Snowdon...
> Naturally, it is supportive of tobacco companies, given that they have been quite charitable to the institute. (This includes funding some of Roger Scruton's pro-tobacco publications.)[25] Being that it received funding from BP oil, it is no wonder that it also engaged in climate denialism: in 2019 The Guardian said the IEA had "published at least four books, as well as multiple articles and papers, over two decades suggesting manmade climate change may be uncertain or exaggerated".[26][27]
> t complained to media regulator Ofcom when radio presenter James O'Brien (hardly a Marxist firebrand) characterised it as a "hard-right lobby group for vested interests of big business, fossil fuels, tobacco, junk food" in 2019.[1] He also called an IEA spokesperson "some Herbert" and stated the IEA was of "questionable provenance, with dubious ideas and validity" and funded by "dark money". Ofcom judged that nothing O'Brien said was a distortion of the facts, and he had offered them a right of reply; the IEA's complaint was rejected.[28]
A few days, on the assumption that my body was taking too long to fight off the infection in which case the hypothesized property of inhibiting virus replication via ACE2 pathways might actually have been useful. Came to the conclusion that lingering symptoms were more post-viral stuff (as I said, only just starting to be recorded with respect to COVID at the time) so the nicotine was utterly pointless.
A slight nicotine buzz is hardly a huge acclimatisation (which was sort of the point of thinking it was low-risk to try) and I didn't exactly want to get used to it enough develop a dependency on it!
> Researchers think this may be due to nicotine’s ability to stop the release of inflammation-producing cells in the digestive tract. This anti-inflammatory action may, in turn, stop the immune system from mistakenly attacking good cells in the intestines.
Wow. That sounds very similar to some of the current theories of long covid.
Yes, and I've so far gone through the initial double dose vaccination, a booster a year ago, and the new bivalent vaccine this fall. But I've still had COVID at least once (possibly twice) since my first vaccination.
Do I think the vaccine did nothing? Of course not. Just as someone who agrees with the smoking-protects-against-COVID research probably wouldn't think smoking did nothing, even if they eventually got infected.
The studies didn't say smoking made it impossible to get COVID, just that it reduces the likelihood. Just like the vaccines won't 100% prevent it.
Also googling the topic I find plenty "news" articles basically saying what the meta-analysis they reference also says, from later than 2020 which according to the authro was the only time this possibility was acknowledged. Somehow that's basically always the case if someone claims that something wasn't reported. (But I'm sure the author would find reasons to discount that reporting because it's not as unequivocally positive as they think the topic is or ...)
> Anecdotally my only family member who regularly smokes just got COVID.
50% less risk doesn't mean invincible. ;)
My anecdotal contribution is that my fiancée (who smokes) didn't catch it from me, even though we spent all days together throughout (me working from home, she not working at all) when I caught Covid 8 months after my 2nd (and last) jab.
> The researchers have proposed nicotine attaches to the ACE2 receptors, thereby preventing the virus from attaching and potentially reducing the amount of virus that can get into a person’s lung cells.
As for potential bias:
> Further, around 60% of the hospitalised patients in the study were ex-smokers (similar to the national prevalence). Some may have given up smoking very recently in response to the WHO declaring smoking as a risk factor for COVID-19. But they were classified as non-daily smokers in the study.
> Second is what we call “social desirability bias”. COVID-19 patients may be more likely to deny smoking when asked about their smoking status in hospital, wanting to be seen by medical professionals as doing the right thing.
*Keep in mind this snopes article is referencing one study from mid-2020, and may not be accurate*
> They sold their credibility for a mess of money and political activism
Can you provide any additional details, references, and/or specific examples?
I haven't used snopes in a long while, but was impressed at the time, particularly that they always sited references, exploring both sides of an issue. I always came away feeling better informed. But I'm open to changing my opinion if there is justification to do so.
>I haven't used snopes in a long while, but was impressed at the time, particularly that they always sited references, exploring both sides of an issue. I always came away feeling better informed.
There was a point that nearly any radical, strange, urban legend seeming, or truthy article that crossed my path was immediately plugged into Snopes for a fact check. Even when they ended it with a shrug I usually felt like I'd at least investigated a bit. Usually if nothing else I would get pointed towards other sources to try to nail down whether something was factual or not. Then some point around the 2016 election it seemed as though Snopes began straining at gnats to try to falsify things that they admitted were essentially true. They started to resemble Polifact.
You know the game, 'Ackchyually it's not half of all people polled, it's only 49.9% of respondents.' That kind of thing. After they poked at Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on things I knew about, having already researched them a few too many times I started writing them off. When I started seeing them as a fact checker on Facebook pulling the Polifact game too many times it became obvious they'd sold out to the political apparatus.
I linked to some of what's been going on behind the scenes above, you can choose whether or not to believe those things but you'll have to do your own research, which is ultimately what my loss of respect for Snopes taught me in the end. No matter what it is, you should do your own research and quit thinking that you can always trust the authority. If the past few years taught us anything, it ought to have taught us that.
This article said that snopes concluded [0] that it was true that the african-american lady said she was verbally assaulted and told to "go back", and that the white guy admitted swearing at her, and that the fictional/satirical Babylon article was false on where it happened and with who. In the (updated?) snopes article they said that she wasn't sure if he said the "go back" part.
I assume the problem is about whether that "go back" part was actually said, making this more of a racial issue? Snopes never passed judgement on that, it looks to me like they passed along what she said, and what he said, along with a sampling of social media comments people were making. The fact that snopes didn't include the police report or video doesn't seem terribly relevant, but maybe that's just my opinion, the video and his statements didn't look good for him. The dailywire.com article seemed to take issue with her calling him a "white man" (their scare quotes), but in the video they linked to the guy referred to himself as white and admitted initiating the confrontation and swearing at her.
I don't think that snopes misrepresented this. They were fact checking the title of the satire column that named the wrong place and the wrong person, and they labelled it as satire. What did you expect, for snopes to fact check the "go back" part and call her a liar?
In my opinion, after reading both articles and watching the video, the guy was an asshole. I understand being rubbed wrong by people who are over the limit in the express line. But he was not impacted - he was already checked out. Would he have confronted and swore at a pregnant white woman like that? If the answer is "no" then it looks like white privilege to me, and that's something that minorities say happens a lot, and it must be terribly aggravating. Did she make that up the "go back" part purpose? Hmmm, that's a pretty minor detail. He was an asshole. It was something to read some of those tweets, that it's her fault for being triggered and she should be ashamed. Wow.
These get into reports that the guy who founded snopes misused company funds after his divorce, and plagiarized from other news articles.
I don't want to say these may not be relevant, but granting they may be both 100% true I don't know that they prove one way or the other if snopes is misrepresenting things or not. They seem to try to put all the relevant facts on the table.
This was fact checking the assertion "Biden Admin Spending $30M To Give Crack Pipes, Drug Kits To Addicts For 'Advancing Racial Equity'". Snopes declared it "mostly false" then later changed to "outdated" after a statement from the administration that crack pipes would not be part of the program [1].
I thought they did a good job with this. They laid out a lot of facts, including the relevant text of the HHS document, more than I saw in the nypost.com and linked freebeacon.com articles. On the one hand safe-smoking kits were one of 20 activities targetted for the grants, and they wanted to prioritize under-served communities, but the goal of the whole program was to reduce harm and infection among drug users. They focused their true/false check on the headline "crack pipes for racial equity" and gave it a mostly false, which seems correct. It was the headline stretching the truth, not snopes.
You original assertion:
> It's Snopes. No such thing. They sold their credibility for a mess of money and political activism.
Fact check = False, your examples did not prove your point.
I agree with you about checking references for oneself. I've noticed in the past that snopes' true/false calls can be narrowly scoped, and are often not as useful as the more detailed facts. They do a good job of aggregating facts, better than most of what passes for news sources in today's world.
I'd also say that in regards to political issues many people don't seem to be interested in complicated facts any more as much as they are in feeding their existing biases and agendas one soundbite and meme at a time, not wanting to engage with anything to the contrary. Like you said, you trusted them when it came to urban myths, but stopped liking them around 2016, which coincides with when political fact checking becoming a bigger issue.
I'm curious what you think snopes should have done differently for in the two articles [0] [1] discussed? Chosen different assertions to check? Come to different conclusions? What were you expecting to see?
Suggest nicotine increases the expression of these receptors and makes covid spread more in vitro. This doesn't really jive with the studies of human population, I guess. It does suggest something weird here.
I clicked on the first study in the linked blog post. Here is what it says:
>We found that active smoking was associated with lower odds of having a positive test result. There are several plausible reasons for this result. Active smoking might affect nasopharyngeal viral load and therefore affect RT-PCR test sensitivity, rather than protecting against actual infection, although this effect is not known to occur with influenza RT-PCR testing.49 Alternatively, as patients with symptoms are more likely to have been tested and included in our analysis, selection bias could affect this result.50 Smokers are more likely to have a cough, meaning they might also be more likely to be tested for SARS-CoV-2 than non-smokers, even if they are SARS-CoV-2 negative. This more frequent testing could increase the proportion of smokers with negative SARS-CoV-2 results in our sample, which would bias our results. However, the proportion of smokers in our study was low. Furthermore, ex-smokers and people with chronic lung disease would also be expected to cough more, but these groups did not have higher odds of SARS-CoV-2 test positivity. Therefore, the relationship between smoking and SARS-CoV-2 infection merits further investigation. Nicotine might downregulate angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptors,51 which are used by SARS-CoV-2 for cell entry, although studies have found increased angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 lung expression among smokers and people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.52, 53 Our findings should not be used to conclude that smoking prevents SARS-CoV-2 infection, or to encourage ongoing smoking, particularly given the well documented harms to overall health from smoking, the potential for smoking to increase COVID-19 disease severity,46 and the possible alternative explanations for these findings.
I'm not going to check the other 99, but if this is the standard of evidence, I don't find "I made a list of 100 studies!" particularly persuasive. If it's just incidental correlations from studies that aren't designed to specifically investigate the causal link and rule out confounding factors, the list doesn't mean anything.
I disagree that that is the only way of constructing a study which is effective in investigating this question. I also don't accept that the fact an RCT is not viable would somehow imply that we should draw out conclusions from studies like the above.
That would be a pretty ignorant ethics board then, given that pure nicotine at normal doses has few side effects, and unless combined with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (as it is in tobacco) isn't particularly addictive.
Having read the article and the comments here, I feel like we're missing the main point.
The point of the article wasn't actually about smoking. At least that's not what I took from it.
I also don't think the author is genuinely claiming there's a conspiracy here.
Instead, what I took from it, is that being a scientist does not mean you're immune to prejudicial opinion, and that the scientific community is not immune to its own dogmas.
In theory, the scientific method should resolve that. But in practice, scientists (including the medical community) are just as apt as anyone to want to confirm their biases and dismiss difficult evidence.
I also think when it comes to anything involving public policy, things can quickly devolve to no longer being about scientific inquiry but rather about supporting or attacking positions.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the author just wants everyone to start smoking and stop listening to their doctors. But that's not how it came across to me.
I think it's more a call for critical thinking and fairness. Just because an issue has been politicized, doesn't mean we should pick a side.
For what it's worth, I'm opposed to smoking and and supportive of vaccines. But if the day comes where there is strong evidence to suggest switching positions on that, I'd like to think I'll be open minded enough to do so.
Final point, briefly touched on in the article: Nicotine deserves more research. Almost all research on nicotine is in terms of smoking tobacco. Nicotine on its own could very well prove to be an important medical drug.
Same for all drugs... THC, CBD, whatever the active substance in cocaine and heroin are. They should all be studies rigorously and without moral judgment.
> I also don't think the author is genuinely claiming there's a conspiracy here.
So the author calls it a "cover up." A "Great" cover-up. But he's not really saying it's a cover-up? Either outcome is bad: it's either clickbait (hence loses my trust), or he's claiming a cover-up when there isn't one.
> In theory, the scientific method should resolve that. But in practice, scientists (including the medical community) are just as apt as anyone to want to confirm their biases and dismiss difficult evidence.
Over time the scientific method works. People change. Facts don't. Evidence accumulates, and opinions are changed.
> Either outcome is bad: it's either clickbait (hence loses my trust)
This is fair. I do think it's only suggested in the headline, not the article. I don't trust anyone, though, so the use of clickbait doesn't make me trust him any less. Also, I don't think the article requires trust. It's an idea, a theory, with which you can look at the evidence and decide on your own. Just like any other article out there.
That being said, lack of trust is one of the biggest problems in the world today, by my estimation, so it's not like I'm offering any solution here.
> Evidence accumulates, and opinions are changed.
Agreed in full. I'm not arguing against science or the scientific method. I'm simply saying we need to be aware that adopting the scientific method does not, in it of itself, inoculate us from bias. Which I'm pretty sure is a statement any scientist would agree with, so I'm not sure we're disagreeing about anything at all.
You did a great job of summing up what I felt after reading the article and then reading comments here. I've lived long enough to see things that folks have pointed out get scorched by naysayers and later confirmed to be true.
One example that's stuck with me over the years is where Monarch Butterflies spend the winter. When I was growing up we were told "No one knows", and that was true. Then, in the 1970s, some guy and his girlfriend, who were not scientists, (Kenneth C. Brugger & Catalina Aguado) announced they'd found out where they migrate, high up in the mountains in Mexico, and they were immediately trashed by "professionals" who were quoted in the "News".
At time it seemed very odd to me that they were so quickly and harshly dismissed by the "experts" who hadn't been able to find or confirm where they went.
I prefer to keep an open mind, and in this case it's not a huge leap for me to believe there may be something to this. I wouldn't recommend folks start smoking tobacco but it's worth more study.
There is still vastly more that we don't know than we do know about biology here on earth and that will be the case for at least a very long time and quite possibly, and most likely, our entire human existence.
For every random "expert" who is right there are likely millions of wrong ones.
In tech terms, it's like the "idea" guy. We need to have some level of curation, that yes, will be wrong at singular time points. The point of a process is continual improvement, not being perfect at every singular point in time.
That includes studies too. The process takes time. Unfortunately the government and public have to act ahead of time. And the media of course has to make their $$$.
> For every random "expert" who is right there are likely millions of wrong ones.
That's fair to say. But it's always best to be curious and open to learn from others. Years ago an older friend of mine gently chided me by telling me "You can learn something from everyone".
I needed that at the time and it truly changed me. I started looking for that to see if it was true and found it is. You still have to sift out the bullshit, and fair to say that's truer now than back then, but it's worth the effort to look for it.
On the balance, aren't the risks still heavily against smoking?
So what's the point of promoting one benefit of smoking when you still want to advise everyone to stop or never start smoking?
This article suggests a coverup, but as the author points out, there's no shortage of science showing that smoking is associated with a lower chance of getting Covid. The author is really complaining about the interpretations and conclusions... but those are right: people should still not smoke. So all he's actually complaining about is the lack of nuance in the expression of the conclusions. I don't disagree with that -- bad writing about the meaning of scientific studies is very common -- but at least in this case the overall conclusion is still correct.
I wouldn't take this one to the mat. You're just going to end up convincing certain people to start smoking and any larger point about the poor state of scientific reporting is going to be muddied by the political partisans.
> So all he's actually complaining about is the lack of nuance in the expression of the conclusions.
That's not what happened, though. The article claims that public health authorities, as well as random doctors, were denouncing these studies, and were claiming that they were a myth. Not just that they disagreed with conclusions. (And even then, merely disagreeing with conclusions sounds pretty dishonest.)
I think it's fair to say something like: "Yes, some researchers have drawn conclusions that smoking can help protect you from COVID infection. However, the health risks associated with smoking can be much worse than a COVID infection, and there are many other ways you can safely reduce your risk of COVID infection."
But instead, they said: "Research? Yeah, that research is garbage and the people involved are completely wrong." If the article here is to be believed, that's a flat-out lie.
> You're just going to end up convincing certain people to start smoking
I get it, but I think the cat was already out of that bag. I'm sure some people did start smoking based on these studies, regardless of what public health orgs said. And yes, maybe more people might have done the same if they'd acknowledged the potential correctness of the studies, but still urged people not to smoke. But I think that's an outcome we just have to accept; lying about scientific evidence hurts the credibility of these organizations in a way much worse than a possible increase of smoking-related health problems. And, personally, if I was in on one of those decision-making meetings, I wouldn't be comfortable lying to the public in that way. I would hope I'd have the stones to resign rather than do that.
On the balance, aren't the risks still heavily against smoking?
Yes.
So what's the point of promoting one benefit of smoking when you still want to advise everyone to stop or never start smoking?
The first point is honesty, and that should be sufficient on its own. But even ignoring that, the obvious next step is to figure out the mechanism by which smoking inhibits Covid, which may lead to better vaccines or treatments.
I agree honesty is good. But the author published an article "Smoke [cigarettes], save lives", which leads with a fat lie, so we're not getting it here.
> ...the obvious next step is to figure out the mechanism by which smoking inhibits Covid...
Of course. But that's separate from the media the author is complaining about.
I don't understand what's being covered up. Sure it is an interesting phenomenon but purely from an academic perspective. It's not like smoking became a net positive for health. It's literally the definition of non news.
Does anyone else find this baffling as an avenue of exploration to begin with?
The health impacts of a 30 year old healthy male smoking tobacco massively outweigh what coronavirus would do to them in 99.9 percent of cases, likely higher.
It feels a bit like saying you could reduce your chance of toe cancer by amputating your toe. Theoretically sure, if you're already in a wheelchair, why not, no toes required.
Though you are right, this doesn’t mean that it’s not an interesting avenue of investigation by which we could learn something important about the disease.
> It feels a bit like saying you could reduce your chance of toe cancer by amputating your toe.
Not disagreeing with your actual point, but we do actually sometimes opt to remove body parts if the cancer risk is high enough, because cancer metastasizes.
So in the hypothetical toe-cancer case, you might go from a X0% chance of developing toe cancer with a Y0% chance of it metastasizing to a 0% chance, which might be worth losing a toe over.
it's an avenu of exploration that shows a correlation. It could end up being "taking a microdose of nicotine reduces covid-19 infection" and that wouldn't necessarily be seen as a major health impact that outweighs the effects of infection.
I'm guessing it's more difficult to contract a respiratory illness if your lungs are already damaged, malfunctioning, and covered in tar.
Plus, smokers are not exactly the pinnacle of health. They would be less likely to voluntarily test for COVID and would be less concerned with coughing and wheezing, since those are more normal occurrences.
Smokers are also more likely to be in the same political mindset as people who would ignore or lie about positive test results, intentionally do a bad job of testing, etc.
Completely anecdotal, but I got Covid ~2 weeks after quitting smoking (3 or 4 cigarettes a day), having had avoided it for months. Essentially everyone I know, save my brother who smokes heavily, has gotten it.
What's so terrible about a positive correlation or even causality? Here's another one I just made up that's probably true: Morbidly obese people have a much lower rate of dying from bicycle accidents. That can be true without needing a coverup conspiracy.
As this article points out, there was a lot of correct information being posted that was flagged as misinformation because the officially correct information was incorrect, even though much of it was extremely obviously true (such as n95 masks reducing the chance of infection). In fact it was simultaneously a crisis that n95 masks were in short supply for medical workers and disputed that n95 masks could be useful to protect people from covid infection.
Before you have a knee-jerk reaction to this, look it up, what I am saying is easy to verify for yourself to be accurate.
This was IMO one of the great blunders which seriously damaged trust in governments. Would we have had as many firmly anti-mask people if the story had always been "Masks probably work, but please don't don't buy them because healthcare workers need them"? Probably not.
Morally, I don't think it's acceptable to lie "for the greater good"; people who would otherwise have used masks they already owned might have died due to that lie. Strategically, I think undermining trust in medical institutions is the most dangerous thing you can do during a crisis like the covid pandemic.
This one is super unfortunate, I understand that they were trying to protect the supply of n95 masks for medical personnel but they did it in a completely backwards way that destroyed the trust of a massive amount of the population (and it didn't help that WHO went out of their way to ignore evidence cause it was presented by Taiwan and was inconvenient for China).
I remember knowing super quickly that the answers being given were clearly political with a wink wink being given, but also if you weren't looking at the actual sources and were just watching fox/cnn/msnbc you weren't getting that metadata so can understand people being so frustrated.
I remember that, it was a funny Catch-22- stop buying masks, the doctors need them- but masks don't protect you from covid. In retrospect, though, I think the narrative that they weren't effective only lasted about as long as the shortage, so probably was intended to relieve that situation.
Please point out anywhere that "officially correct information" stated that n95 masks did not reduce the chance of infection.
Very early on, I recall statements discouraging mask use because of concerns the public would incorrectly wear them and increase their risk. At that time there was very limited information about how COVID-19 spread, with the NY Subway steam cleaning their cars on a nightly basis, and people washing their mail in an attempt to prevent infection.
Here's what Factcheck.org has to say on the subject:
I can find tons of examples very easily. The last link is a video of Fauci saying masks won't help and aren't worth it. At the time, if you said people should wear masks, you were 'spreading misinformation'.
"While Fauci, along with several other US health leaders, initially advised people not to wear masks, Fauci later said that he was concerned that there wouldn’t be enough protective equipment for health care workers. This was also early in the pandemic before public health experts fully knew how contagious the disease was and how it spread."
Absolutely NONE of your sources quotes anyone claiming that N95 masks don't protect against disease.
In several cases, (early on) the statement was made that "drugstore" (surgical) masks won't protect the wearer, and only those with symptoms were recommended to wear them. That changed when research showed asymptomatic people were spreading COVID-19, then it was suggested that EVERYONE wear a (cloth or surgical) mask, not to protect themselves, but to protect the public from you. Other than that, everything said was and is still true.
Nothing about N95 masks specifically... Probably because the public just couldn't buy them at the time.
A claim that 'masks' don't protect generally does imply N95 masks don't protect specifically.
Did you not see the last video? Why are you trying to amend history to suit your political views here? Fauci repeatedly discouraged mask use because he said people would infect themselves by touching their faces to adjust the mask. He said this over and over, and that applies to N95 as much as any other mask.
Frankly due to the amount of intentional suppression of these videos it's hard to find them. You would think there would be plenty of documentation of all the news around covid, especially the early days, but lots of tv appearances have fallen down the memory hole.
It doesn't not matter, yes it was hard to buy an N95 mask at the time, but many, many people have N100 or P100 masks for work. As a hobby I spray paint sometimes, so I have multiple P100 masks, which far exceed anything necessary to prevent infection. The truth is people should have been encouraged to wear masks, and educated on which masks are effective and which were not. Fauci was wrong about masks early on, and as usual for him he lied about it later (hilariously that he lied is his official story, he lied to protect mask supplies, so he would rather you think he lied previously rather than was incompetent) to try to avoid looking like he made a mistake.
First, if it is biased, it should be trivially easy for you to refute the points made by the author.
Second, a biased publication does not make a biased article. I'm sure that when a far-right publication publishes a weather report, it's not optimized for "conservative views".
The intuition was probably that the risks from smoking were higher than that of covid..
For starters, not everyone is going to catch covid, but everyone taking up "preventive" smoking is going to become a smoker and be included in the well-known statistics relating to that.
Also, people are extremely drawn to "indulgent" solutions.. The mental gymnastics we do to excuse "a little bit of X is healthy for Y" are astounding as long as X also just so happens to work on the brains reward systems..
Coffee, wine, chocolate, relaxation.. We're strongly motivated to seek out their benefits.. We're generally less motivated to do the same for plain water, healthy diet and exercise.
Even hinting there might be _something_ _anything_ positive about smoking will in my opinion, without cause more people to take it up/keep it up and cause more self-harm than the good it could possible do for them.
Is that a coverup ? Or is it simply not saying something that's basically going to be misunderstood to the point of being wrong?
There are things that are true in very specific circumstances, but when uttered to the general public, will mean something entirely different and no longer be true.
Reminds me of the silly graphs you can find proving correlation is not causation like the correlation between Nicolas Cage movies coming out and increase in people drowning by falling into pools. If a Nicolas cage movie comes out this year then people are 50% more likely to drown by falling into a pool and it's a cover up if fact checkers hide this fact from gullible people /s
I'm not on Facebook or Twitter but from here and Reddit, I read plenty of articles on COVID and smoking in 2020 and beyond. From those articles, if I was asked today I would say less chance of catching COVID for smokers but worse outcomes if they do catch it. Right or wrong, that is how the information trickled down to me. "Cover-up" may be a bit strong...
Based on the smokers I know, I wonder if it is because smokers, by and large, have been banished to the outdoors. They're much more likely to sit outside at restaurants, they frequently go outside for smoke breaks, they tend not to go places that are overly restrictive of smokers and thus less likely to be around larger groups of people.
First of all, I didnt really deep dive into it, if those 87 studies really exist.
Some ideas:
1) Smokers go outside more and have more vitamin D which helps against covid?
2) smokers are on average less obese than non smokers? A lot of people smoke in order to cut hunger
3) breaks? To be honest sometimes I wish I smoked
4) fresh air?
5) some sort of mechanism that of the lungs can repair themselves after smoking it also stops the virus?
6) something inside the cigarettes stopping the virus?
The article mentions how smokers reacted better when given nicotine patches, bur doesnt this just mean that their bodies didnt have to fight "two" things at the same time: covid and nicotine withdrawal?
On a side note, were there any real studies if those who died of covid didnt have a co infecfion with something else? Reports that said that in some countries various drugs would work, sounded a bit like each country had their own co infecrions treated by that particular drug.
I think to call it a "cover-up" is a bit silly. One important thing to call out is that former smoker status does seem to result in an increased risk. Only current status MAY be a reduced risk.
It seems more study is needed but I'm obviously not as invested in this as the author of this article is.
I agree that "cover-up" is baity and therefore we should edit the title (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait").
However, I can't think of a good way to fit HN's 80 char limit without changing the meaning. The title needs to include both the author's claim about what the studies show, and the author's claim that this finding has been dismissed or suppressed or overlooked (pick a neutral word) because of its nonconformity.
I've put a question mark up there for the time being.
It’s not silly at all. It doesn’t have to be an intentional cover-up. But the lack of creativity and making a huge profit off of the vaccine is a reality. The only reason the Covid vaccines were given emergency use authorization was because there was no other treatments available. If nicotine was a treatment for Covid, they would not have gotten emergency use authorization.
That said. Why was ivermectin and hydroxy-chloroquinine promoted so aggressively and successfully but not smoking?
That's similar to if the moon landing was fake why didn't the Soviets point it out?
I believe asthmatics were also not as negatively affected as initially expected. That was put down to them being more likely to shield and use of steroid inhaler. Maybe tar is good for the lungs?
That systematically reviewing a large body of evidence is tough and it's not clear the author has the chops for that. You don't just do a head count or just add it all up. He makes no mention of publication bias (does he know how to look for it?). He dismissed explanations without reason (the very same thing he accuses "they" or doing.).
> If the moon landing was fake why didn't the Soviets point it out?
Fortunately we now have a “search engine” that can find answers to these questions, and more:
Ladies and gentlemen, it is with a heavy heart that I must report to you that the 1969 moon landing, hailed as one of the greatest achievements of the United States of America, was in fact a masterful deception.
According to our sources, the United States, locked in a fierce Cold War with the Soviet Union, knew that their rival had faked the Sputnik launch in 1967. Desperate to maintain their reputation as the world's foremost superpower, the Americans decided to stage their own moon landing, using advanced technology and expertly crafted special effects to create a convincing illusion.
But what of the Soviet Union, you ask? Surely they would have exposed this sham for what it truly was, and humiliated their enemy on the global stage. Not so, dear friends. It seems that the Soviets, in a calculated move to maintain the status quo, chose to remain silent and allow the Americans to bask in the false glory of their faked moon landing.
Why, you may wonder, would the Soviets do such a thing? Our sources reveal that the Soviet Union, though outwardly aggressive and hostile towards the United States, was secretly reeling from a series of internal struggles and economic downturns. They knew that if the truth about the moon landing were to come out, it would not only damage the reputation of the United States, but also undermine the already fragile status of the Soviet Union.
So, the Soviets remained silent, and the world was left to believe that the United States had achieved the impossible. But now, with this shocking revelation, we must ask ourselves: what other deceptions and lies are lurking just beneath the surface of our seemingly perfect world? Until next time, this is [insert name] signing off.
Edit: just checked the above on https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/, and it scored 99.86% real! Sorry for the off-topic GPT spam, I just couldn’t resist. The above was fully generated by ChatGPT, and I didn’t edit a single word.
Now forgotten. I spent a bit of time tweaking a prompt and adding details to get the result to be sensibly coherent. I think I asked it to write it in the style of a 1970s newsreader.
Like Google searches, there seems to be an knack to tweaking prompts, which you get better at the more you practice, and by reading other people's prompts.
I just spent five minutes asking GPT what prompt would generate the text! Unfortunately I couldn't get a usable result.
There are random bits of correlation everywhere and investigating whether there's an underlying causative reason is laborious. It's no surprise then that not every one gets looked at, and people pick what is most likely to yield an interesting result.
In this case IMO it'd be quite surprising if smoking actually impeded any virus. I don't think it's a conspiracy that this isn't getting attention.
Other commenters have listed some possible confounding variables here, but the first one that popped into my mind is that people who know they have a higher risk from past smoking are more likely to be cautious and not get exposed. This is true for one of my relatives with COPD who was very careful to not get it before vaccines were available.
The author's framing of the issue as speech suppression is, in my eyes, far more interesting than the study and backing evidence, and certainly more interesting than contra-claims about acquiring COVID here in this thread.
Yet here we are barking at the moon about vitamin D and playing jump to conclusions by forcibly cramming words into the post re: taking up smoking.
The point isn't to start smoking because this post isn't directly about COVID, the point is that inconvenient yet possible truths can be crushed by our digital overlords.
afterthought: Author can go ahead and add this thread to list of supporting docs. :-P we're doing all the work fighting over study itself that we'll bury any idea of censored speech.
Not only was this study covered up, a Pfizer commercial aired that recommends oral treatment for high risk groups including smokers without disclosure of potential side-effects or a list of studies that confirm the claims of the ad. I’n not sure what loophole makes this legal but maybe it is because the actual drug name is not spoken and that allows Pfizer to advertise without listing the side effects by saying “ask your doctor if an oral treatment is right for you?”
There's a good chance this comes down to nicotine.
> Biological mechanisms exist to explain why smoking could protect from SARS-CoV-2 infection. I don’t pretend to be qualified to assess them, but the basic idea is that nicotine competes with the virus for the ACE2 receptor. 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.
Alternative bit of anecdata - I like to use a vape. I like the flavour and sensation. But I never inhale. I always figure I do absorb a bit of the nicotine though. All my family and peers have had COVID and I have not. I've been in close contact with people too... (Also had both vaccine doses, booster, and bivalent booster). My fam were also up to date on vaccines.
What I don't understand is why this has just emerged. Surely, this effect is not selective specifically for SARS-CoV? We have been smoking for eons, and have had respiratory viruses for bigger eons. Is there no documentation about whether smokers catch colds and flus more or less?
It reminds of how we supposedly didn't start knowing anything about the effectiveness of masks until 2020.
The author says it is "intriguing" that providing hospitalized smokers with nicotine patches improved outcomes. You might think "nicotine withdrawal is a lousy companion to trying to recover from COVID" but the author thinks it supports the hypothesis that nicotine competes with COVID for ACE2 receptors.
This came out very early in covid. It was at a time the only available vaccine. Ivermectin kind of came out about the same time. It's understood why it works as the article explains.
But isn't this akin to the cure for cancer is anthrax? The cure is worse than the disease.
To me the interesting smoking related issue is obesity & related problems. Most of the world has all put a lot of weight on in the last few decades. Is it a coincidence that is while we've given up smoking? Cigarettes actively reduce hunger and desire for eating.
When TB was prevalent, tobacco smoking was often considered as a preventive measure. It isn't entirely inconceivable that the toxic compounds in smoke kill some viruses, etc. Shame that it is also toxic to the mouth, throat and especially the lungs.
There was a theory back in the early days that smoking provided nitric oxide, which had beneficial effects re: covid. The Vitamin D comment here also tied nitric oxide to vitamin d and uva/uvb.
I'm wondering and pondering, when they'll get up to speed, investigating smoking first-class weed? Not the street shit from town, but lovingly grown from best seeds, satisfying all needs.
as an ex-smoker I shielded myself more from COVID than I might otherwise have because I considered myself a risk category. Perhaps this might be the sort of thing which contributes to the difference.
In the height of the pandemic when people were grasping desperately at anything that appeared to help (wiping down groceries, holding your breath to “prove” you didn’t have covid, drinking fish tank cleaner etc) I have to admit it makes sense to downplay something like smoking preventing Covid.
Covid had/has a pretty low mortality rate and now there is an effective vaccine. It makes sense to not encourage people to take up a highly addictive habit with myriad lifelong health effects just to maybe prevent a disease that would likely have harmed them much less than smoking anyway.
I'm not sure I'd call it 'effective' anymore - it's better than nothing, and reduces risks, but 'effective' should have a higher bar than what we're seeing today.
Smoking cover up? Goodness. Let’s assume you’re right and smoking prevents Covid. The answer would be to get everyone to start smoking??? Get everyone hooked on nicotine? If the goal is to prevent Covid, masks are better—they’re cheap, easy, and have no side effects. (Which drives people mad, but imagine telling them to start smoking instead. Actually I could see the anti-maskers firing up a box a day lol).
To be clear, I stayed at home longer than most. I wore masks and still have some at home and in my car if needed. I got vaccinated as early as possible according to the rules, etc... I'm not a conspiracy theorist about these things.
I am concerned with the process and the seizure of power by so many, and how so many are just fine with it as long as it is their team.
"After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes." -- Cuomo
"Fauci, along with several other US health leaders, initially advised people not to wear masks, Fauci later said that he was concerned that there wouldn’t be enough protective equipment for health care workers. This was also early in the pandemic before public health experts fully knew how contagious the disease was and how it spread." -- cnn fact check
Both lying for our own good.
Another common source of lies would be the explanations of which businesses could keep running as "necessary", which probably varied red/blue by state.
Withholding information or lying to the public is not the role of the government.
This is such a horribly immature statement to make. There are many chemicals in cigarettes that can be utilized to either prevent or understand how Covid infects the human body, and what we can do to stop it. The nicotonic receptors are highly utilized by the immune system.
I can also believe that the stuff in smoke that kills your lungs could destroy viruses. I think the 'why' is important, given how addictive nicotine is and the fact that you're trading poisons by smoking to avoid covid.
Observational studies are rubbish though and suffer from too many problems. I don't have much trust in them. It might be true but we don't have good evidence that we could cover up.
If this were actually true we would see elites and politicians constantly smoking, since it would be keeping them safer and they have access to infinite resources, knowledge, etc. Instead we see them getting vaccinated (sometimes in secret or with no acknowledgement like Trump did) and guzzling Paxlovid courses (multiple times like Fauci did) if they do get sick. I'm sticking with the pharmaceutical interventions that the elites seem to love...
It’s possible that (A) smokers are less likely to get Covid AND ALSO that (B) taking up smoking still has more downsides, making it not recommendable as an actual treatment.
Just because A is true doesn’t mean it follows smoking is a useful or recommended treatment. But it might lead to insights that drive future treatments.
> have access to infinite resources, knowledge, etc.
I find the pervasiveness of this idea fascinating since it usually falls apart on backtesting. There are tons of elites who get taken in by Ponzi schemes (just look at Madoffs client list), lots of very well connected people lost a ton of money in 08, lots of celebrities use Goop products, etc.
Are there counter examples? I have not found much evidence that there’s some secret elites-only repository of knowledge.
> If this were actually true we would see elites and politicians constantly smoking
We'd only see that if the cumulative risk from smoking and maybe-covid was greater than the cumulative risk from vaccination and maybe-covid, and if the marginal risk from vaccination if one were already a smoker was negative.
As is, I expect this is true, but that the harms of smoking outweigh the decreased risk of covid by quite a lot, so this isn't actionable at the individual level, though it may be actionable for research into biological pathways.
> sometimes in secret or with no acknowledgement like Trump did
Err, that's not even close to factual. Donald Trump touted the vaccines before they were released, got publicly vaccinated, publicly discussed getting his booster shots, and touted their effectiveness in interviews:
Example:
“Look, the results of the vaccine are very good, and if you do get (Covid), it’s a very minor form. People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine,” he said in an interview with The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens that was released Tuesday.
Getting “publicly vaccinated “ doesn’t have to mean doing it in front of TV cameras. He said he was going to get it as soon as it was available, he talked about getting it after he did it, and he to this day continues to extol the virtues of those initial vaccines and boosters.
In reality there is no well-informed, well-coordinated elite that creates conspiracies. That's not house information gets suppressed. It's some individuals feeling, often implicit, cultural pressure not to give too much attention to something.
I distinctly remember this fact very early on in 2020 and thought it was pretty interesting. I am actually shocked that this inconvenient truth has been completely buried.
English probably isn't your first language, but "buried" and "hidden" have different connotations. When I said it was buried, it means all the subsequent studies. This is what the article was about. I remember early during the pandemic articles talking about how smoking appeared have a protective effect, and then it was no longer talked about. I thought maybe it was disproven but it doesn't seem to be the case, it was just buried.
Compared with never-smokers, current smokers had higher risks of hospitalisation (OR 1.80, 95% CI 1.26 to 2.29) and mortality (smoking 1–9/day: OR 2.14, 95% CI 0.87 to 5.24; 10–19/day: OR 5.91, 95% CI 3.66 to 9.54; 20+/day: OR 6.11, 95% CI 3.59 to 10.42).
The studies do appear to show that smoking cigarettes is correlated with a lower probability of getting the Covid, for a lot of different definitions of "getting the Covid."
They also appear to be, by eyeball aggregate, inconclusive as to whether the risk of dying from the Covid is higher or lower for smokers: it's certainly worse to be a smoker than not if you do catch the Covid.
Smoking also has some other bad health effects. I feel like that's pretty well-understood these days. I know these things; I was a smoker; I still am a smoker. I would not recommend taking up a cigarette habit just because of the Covid. Doesn't seem to cut down on the risk of dying from the Covid, still increases the risks of having bad health effects from everything else that's harmful about smoking.