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The great Covid and smoking cover-up?
31–40 of 248 posts
Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?
#32As 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 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.
Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?
#33I 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.
Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?
#34This 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 coupl…
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Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?
#35The 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.
Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?
#36I'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...
Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?
#37In 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 t…
> and now there is an effective vaccine
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.
Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?
#38Observational 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.
Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?
#39I’ll just leave this here:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.6539...
Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?
#40As 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…
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:
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/scicheck-misinformation-ab...