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The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

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Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#11

Post by johnnyo »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #6

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 tha…

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.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#12

Post by ajmurmann »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #6

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 tha…

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.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#13

Post by Izkata »

josefresco wrote: post #8

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.

> Anecdotally my only family member who regularly smokes just got COVID.

Took nearly 3 years, that's pretty good ;)

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#14

Post by i_am_proteus »

Author compiled a lot of studies on his web log: https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2021/08/smoking-and...

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.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#15

Post by xphilter »

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).

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#16

Post by mort96 »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#18

Post by EMM_386 »

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.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#19

Post by Izkata »

xphilter wrote: post #15

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).

The next step would be to figure out why and if it can be duplicated without the negative effects.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#20

Post by Marsymars »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #6

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 tha…

> 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.

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