Smoking and COVID - Setting the Record Straight

"Tobacco and e-cigarette companies are exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to advertise their harmful and addictive products on social media, undermine minimum age purchase restrictions meant to protect youth and make unproven and illegal health claims, according to new analysis published by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. The analysis includes tactics from big tobacco companies, e-cigarette makers and vape shops in 28 countries."
"On social media, Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco – the world's two largest tobacco companies – are appropriating popular "Stay at Home" hashtags promoted by governments and health authorities to instead market heated cigarette products like Glo and IQOS and e-cigarettes like Vype. In Spain, British American Tobacco has posted photos advertising Vype e-cigarettes accompanied by the hashtag #FrenaLaCurva (#FlattenTheCurve) and in Italy, Philip Morris has used #DistantiMaVicini (#DistantButClose) to advertise IQOS. The companies have also promoted at-home music series and launched exclusive music videos to promote tobacco products online."
Cision

"Few of those hospitalized with the coronavirus are smokers, and researchers are trying to understand why, according to VICE."
"One hypothesis is that nicotine, which has anti-inflammatory properties, may interfere with the way that COVID-19 causes an overreaction of the immune system."
"The hypothesis comes from Konstantinos Farsalinos, a cardiologist in Greece who focuses on tobacco-use reduction. Farsalinos noticed that few COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized in China were smokers, though about half of men in the country smoke."
"Farsalinos and colleagues wrote a new paper available as a preprint and scheduled to be published in Internal and Emergency Medicine. They found that among 13 studies in China with nearly 6,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, the rate of smokers ranged from 1.4% to 12.6%. No studies recorded e-cigarette use."
"'The results were remarkably consistent across all studies and were recently verified in the first case series of COVID-19 cases in the U.S.', the authors wrote, calling for an 'urgent investigation'."
"Of course, Farsalinos doesn't recommend that people should begin smoking simply to attempt to avoid a severe case of COVID-19. Smoking is still a leading cause of preventable death across the globe."
WebMD News Brief

In the never-ending annals of 'this does not compute' there are now contradictory reports going the rounds on the role of smoking and COVID-2. Initially, the World Health Organization put out a general alert that makes eminently good sense; smokers are more imperilled by the effects of the novel coronavirus than non-smokers. Who could conceivably contest that finding? After all, the virus goes on to play havoc with human organs, and its effect on the respiratory system is what ultimately takes the lives of sufferers. Smoking affects the lungs, other organs and certainly the respiratory system, setting smokers up for trouble down the road when a disease arrives targeting the respiratory system.

"Tobacco-leaf COVID-19 vaccine ready for human trials: World’s No.2 cigarette company British American Tobacco said on Friday it was ready to test its potential COVID-19 vaccine using proteins from tobacco leaves on humans, after it generated a positive immune response in pre-clinical trials."
"The maker of Lucky Strike cigarette said once it gets approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the vaccine, it would progress to Phase 1 trials or testing on humans. The company raised eyebrows in April when it said it was developing a COVID-19 vaccine from tobacco leaves and could produce 1 million to 3 million doses per week if it got the support of government agencies and the right manufacturers. Drugmakers across the globe have been racing to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, caused by the new coronavirus, with some of the vaccines already in human trials. Experts have suggested that a COVID-19 vaccine could take 12-18 months to develop. On Friday, London-based BAT said it had submitted a pre-investigative new drug application to the FDA and that the agency had acknowledged the submission. BAT said it was also talking with other government agencies around the world about the vaccine."
Montreal Gazette

If the news from some sources can be credited current smokers were seen to have a markedly lower risk of COVID-19 death than do those who never smoked and former smokers, correcting for other variables. Smokers, current and former smokers are threatened with all the complications arising out of ingesting nicotine harming the body system, most notably the heart, lungs and respiratory system, quite apart from the issue of lung, esophagus, larynx, mouth, throat, kidney, bladder, liver, pancreas, stomach, cervix, colon, and rectum, cancers as well as acute myeloid leukemia.

If that isn't sufficient, in and of itself, to cure anyone of the idea that smoking is a non-harmful and enjoyable habit, not at all an addiction leading to dreadful health outcomes, what could possibly convince anyone of its dread toll? Until COVID-19 arrived, and suddenly smokers can feel justified in resisting the best advice of the medical community to do everything possible to wean themselves away from addiction to nicotine. The conflicting messages of smoking avoidance versus nicotine providing protection against the effects of COVID has created confusion for some, a sense of triumph for smokers.

A study out of the U.K. Biobank had reported that "regular smokers" appear to have lower incidents of  contracting the novel coronavirus. Among the Biobank study participants 580 took part with a significant ratio in favour of smokers avoiding the virus. In a much larger, in fact huge study released in early May, a collaboration between the University of Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, anonymized records of 17 million adults were used from the U.K.'s National Health Service.

The idea was to create a list of various risk-factors for COVID-19 deaths, and what brought this to the attention of the public were peculiar numbers seeming to imply that smokers of current vintage less frequently died of the novel coronavirus than non-smokers or former smokers. "The media immediately picked it up and ran with the idea that smoking is protecting people from dying from COVID, [along with other] really strong causal claims, which were not at all the goal of the paper", pointed out Eleanor Murray, of Boston University.

"The reason it's getting play is I think it's sort of feeding into things that people kind of wanted to be true. I'm seeing them report just the prevalence of smoking in the COVID patients and the prevalence of smoking in the general population. But for most areas, COVID patients are much older than the general population."
"The life expectancy among smokers is lower than among non-smokers. And so it's entirely possible that if you're looking at a sample that's mostly older individuals, you might just expect any sample like that to have fewer smokers than the overall general population."
“If smokers already have decreased lung capacity, they may not notice the milder symptoms of COVID, for example, and they may not [be] getting tested as much."
"Taking the conclusion from [preliminary studies] that there's some protective effect of nicotine is probably wishful thinking, just because there's really no clear evidence here either way of whether smoking is at all protective [against] COVID,"
Eleanor Murray, assistant professor of epidemiology, Boston University