Michael J. McFadden
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April 24
Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains" and "TobakkoNacht -- The Antismoking Endgame"
How does COVID 19 affect smokers?
Originally Answered: Why does COVID 19 hit smokers harder?
If you go to Preliminary Estimates of the Prevalence of Selected Underlying...
you will see that the largest and most authoritative to study to this date basically upholds and intensifies the results of almost all the studies already done:
Smokers are FAR LESS LIKELY to get COVID-19 than nonsmokers.
The CDC study cited looked at a randomly selected group of 7,162 COVID-19 victims for which completed medical information was available.
They reported on many facets of what they found, but gave very little attention to one row of figures that was down near the bottom of their “Background Conditions” list in their TABLE 1. That row of figures showed how many out of the 7,162 were smokers — a group that they no doubt expected would be highly disproportionately represented among the sick and dying of this horrible viral respiratory infection.
Go take a quick look at that link and that table so you’ll understand what I’m about to say next:
COVID-19 VERY disproportionately attacks and kills NONsmokers far more than smokers.
Of the 7,162 COVID-19 subjects over 7,000 were current nonsmokers or ex-smokers while fewer than a hundred were active smokers!
Yes, you read that correctly. If you packed all the COVID-19 sufferers in that CDC study into buses holding 100 passengers apiece you’d have about 70 buses.
You might board and canvass 69 out of the 70 buses and NEVER FIND A SINGLE SMOKER among them!
Go back to that study. Read it. Then feel free to check out the dozen or so other studies that have been done so far. See if you can find a SINGLE ONE where smokers are in a majority. Heck, see if you can find a single one where they make up even a percentage representation that would be equal to the local population if smoking had NO effect.
You won’t. (Unless they’ve added a new one or I’ve somehow missed one!)
Uniformly, and I believe universally, they show smoking as having a protective effect, at least statistically, against contracting COVID-19!
Note that I add the “statistical” caution in there. Unlike the antismokers I often criticize, I’m well aware that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Antismokers will be quick to point out smoking’s correlation with cirrhosis of the liver as well as with auto accidents. (Heh, and they’ll try to translate the latter into bans on smoking while driving!)
What they never mention is that smoking is highly correlated with alcohol drinking. As habits, the two go very pleasantly together, and drinkers, particularly heavy drinkers who usually aren’t very health-conscious in general, tend to smoke a lot.
It’s the DRINKING that causes the cirrhosis and the accidents: NOT the smoking.
Sooo… is THAT what’s happening with COVID-19? Is smoking NOT protective against the disease? Is it just wildly correlated with something else out there that people do in their lives?
I’d say that that is highly, HIGHLY doubtful. Why? Because although I’m not a doctor of any sort I’ve spent a lot of time over the last forty years reading and thinking and writing a lot in the general area of smoking and health and smoking bans and antismoking tactics and propaganda. Over the last few weeks, since this correlation of smoking with a sort of immunity to COVID-19 first became apparent, I’ve looked very hard for other activities or conditions that could be the cause of the seemingly crazy numbers.
I have found NO other good explanation as of this point.
Even the wild and scary news story that splashed through hundreds of news outlets and likely thousands of web pages and blogs in the last two weeks about smokers being 14 times as likely to suffer all sorts of varied COVID-19-related fates is about as bogus as they get. If you read Michael Shmoish's answer to First we were told that smokers were likely to be very adversely affected by covid19 and now we are informed that nicotine actually impedes the virus. What is the truth? you will find that the claim is based on FIVE smokers (out of the 80 patients they found for the study, 75 were NONsmokers!) and on the proportion of the more serious form of COVID-19 to the less serious. That figure is worth virtually nothing against the overall backdrop of the absence of smokers to be found amongst the sick in the study.
Soo ... why did you hear so much about that 14x figure? I’m still checking that out, but it almost certainly was from a press-released brainchild of a government-funded antismoking group … one of the groups that swallow hundreds of millions of MSA and smokers’ tax dollars every year and vomit it back up in the form of hateful propaganda … such as this warning about smokers and “14 times” and the coronavirus … a warning clearly designed, as usual, to paint smokers as undesirables — lepers who will bring disease and death to innocent children and nonsmokers.
Except that this time … it seems it’s the nonsmokers and COVID-19 who are doing that bringing … and the nonsmokers who are suffering … unfortunately in very large numbers that are likely to get larger if we jump out of our homes and forget “social distancing” too quickly.
MJM, who apologizes for the length of this answer … but the material is a bit complicated, and it is VERY important for people to understand.
