Old Toby and the Battle Against the Bat Virus

One of the most interesting and amusing aspects of the pandemic is the growing amount of data that suggests that tobacco smoking may under certain circumstances actually help fight the disease. It is an odd piece of information in that it so counter-intuitive. Other conditions for which nicotine is believed to have at least palliative and in some cases, perhaps, preventative effects, are generally chronic conditions of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The Wuhan Flu or, if you prefer, COVID-19, on the other hand, is a respiratory disease. In its ordinary, moderate, form it is not noticeably different from the seasonal flu. In its more severe and potentially fatal form, it develops into the intensive kind of pneumonia that was labelled Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS when the first coronavirus of this type appeared almost twenty years ago. This is exactly the sort of disease to which one would expect smoking to make one particularly vulnerable. It is most dangerous to the elderly, those with other complicating factors, and especially the combination of the two. Foremost among the other complicating factors are chronic conditions that compromise the immune and respiratory systems. Tobacco has been increasingly demonized since 1965 precisely on the basis of its being a leading cause of such respiratory diseases as emphysema and lung cancer.

Initially, the evidence seemed to point to what one would logically expect, namely that tobacco smoking increased the risk of death from this disease. The countries that were hit the first and the hardest were countries where smoking is still as common today as it was in North America about fifty years ago – China and Italy. When the virus arrived in North America, the city that was hit the hardest was New York City the reputation of which as a city of chain-smokers persists to this day. All of this is consistent with the expectation that the habit of tobacco smoking increases vulnerability to the coronavirus.

That this logical expectation is in fact the truth is the position taken by the World Health Organization and by public health authorities around the globe. Within the past seventy-two hours - it was forty-eight at the time I commenced writing this - a large number of these have issued statements to that effect, warning the public against the idea that cigarettes might protect them from COVID-19. Many of these statements are poorly written and they give every impression of having been issued in haste as if in an effort to try and put out a fire that had sprung up where somebody had flicked cigarette ash onto an official narrative.

Rumours that even though the virus was taking its worst tolls in populations with a high percentage of smokers, the smokers themselves were surprisingly underrepresented among its victims, had been growing for weeks. Then they were followed by something that was substantially more than rumour. Late in April, a study done in France found that in China, France, and the United States, smokers were a disproportionately low percentage of those who required hospitalization for COVID-19. The Economist reported on this study early in May. Then, late last week the preliminary research of a study done in England on various risk factors associated with fatal cases of COVID-19, pointed in the same, surprising, direction with regards to smoking.

Colby Cosh reported on all of this in an article that appeared in the National Post on Monday. What the studies seem to be indicating is that if age and sex are the only other factors considered, smokers are at greater risk than non-smokers, but if people have chronic respiratory conditions or an “inferior socioeconomic status” they are at less risk if they are current smokers than if they are ex-smokers or just non-smokers. Cosh in his report included the caveat “No one, including me, will advise a non-smoker to start smoking to ward off the novel coronavirus” to which he adds, amusingly “But, uh…if I had pre-existing plans to quit I might personally have delayed them.”

Cosh followed up on this with a second article on Wednesday. In his first article he had observed that the studies in question offered no explanation for why this would be the case. Whether it was the nicotine in the cigarettes, the tar or added chemicals, or even merely the habit of frequent coughing associated with smoking that made the difference, was a matter that would have to be inquired into separately. After his first article he had been contacted, however, by a Greek doctor named Konstantinos Farsalinos who had written about this oddity back in April. Farsalinos had offered two suggestions as to an explanation. The first is that nicotine might hinder the coronavirus’ ability to generate a “cytokine storm” and thus turn a person’s own immune system against him. Nicotine is believed to inhibit precisely those cytokines that have an inflammatory effect and which cause so much damage when driven into overdrive by the virus. The second suggestion was that nicotine might affect the production of the ACE2 enzyme which is the virus's main entry point into cells in a way that causes its protective function to kick into high gear and work against the virus. Cosh notes that these explanations are not mutually exclusive, nor are they the only possibilities.

Since the thought that tobacco smoking might convey even the slightest of health benefits runs completely contrary to health fascism’s oldest and most sacred narrative it is no wonder that that the public health authorities have been issuing panicky statements, full of misspelled words, grammatical errors, and logical fallacies in their haste to condemn the aforementioned studies and assure the public that demon tobacco is still sporting its horns and cloven hoofs. Amusingly, they have attacked the French study on the grounds of alleged ties between its lead author and the tobacco industry. What makes this so funny is that it comes from people funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Among the things this industry is noted for are its aggressive attempts to stamp out any alternative forms of treatment to their expensive, patented, medicines, its advertising strategy of brainwashing people into thinking the solution to all their problems is to be found in a pill bottle and thus instilling in them a psychological predisposition towards substance abuse and addiction, and its unethical and inhumane experiments and tests, generally carried out in countries that don’t have strict laws against these things. If any industry makes the tobacco industry look squeaky clean by comparison it is the pharmaceutical industry and that industry owns the World Health Organization, the public health authorities, and most of the medical profession, lock stock and barrel.

Their corrupt influence has certainly been on prominent display throughout this pandemic. That the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, also commonly used for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, is highly effective in treating coronaviruses of precisely this type has been known since the first SARS outbreak. By the time the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March, studies in Europe and elsewhere were already showing that this was true of this virus as well. More recently, the extremely high success rate of those physicians who have used this drug to treat COVID-19, especially in combination with zinc and the antibiotic azithromycin, has pretty much conclusively demonstrated that it works and it works well. There has been a thoroughly dishonest campaign of media disinformation that claims otherwise. The drug's known side effects have been greatly exaggerated. There was that outright deception involving people who self-administered a form of chloroquine that is used as a cleaning product with disastrous consequences. A test in which it was administered after the severe form of the disease had already progressed to the point where the patients were put on ventilators, a point at which the chances of any treatment – including the ventilators – working drops to next to nothing, was touted as "disproving" the drug's effectiveness. Against the ever-growing body of success stories from physicians using this drug in the field, the media has trotted out the "experts" who insist that its efficacy can only be demonstrated by a particular kind of clinical trial. While this is impressive to those who reflexively genuflect before scientific authority, others, who are more familiar with their methodology, will recognize that the kind of trials they are talking about are tests where all the variables are completely under the control of the "researcher" thereby granting him control of the outcome. This entire smokescreen can be partly explained by the fact that the drug was promoted by Donald the Orange. The media would go out of their way to contradict him no matter what he said. If he were to say "the sky is blue, the sun is shining, the birds are singing in the trees" they would say "the sky is black, it is a dark and stormy night and that is the howl of the timber wolf you hear" and then dig up some expert somewhere who would back them up against the evidence of their own eyes and ears. There is more to the explanation than this, however. The anti-malaria drug has been around for almost a century and is cheap to produce. Treating COVID patients with it would be far less profitable for the pharmaceutical industry than forcing everybody to take some expensive, patented, vaccine.

It is people on the payroll of the corrupt industry described above who are running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to stomp out the fire set by these interesting studies about tobacco. This is perhaps stronger evidence than anything in the studies themselves that there is something to this.

Whether or not that is the case, of course, is something that must await further studies before it can be determined. As I pointed out at the start of this essay, it certainly seems to be counter-intuitive. It would certainly tickle my fancy, however, as someone who despises the public health authorities, the pharmaceutical industry, the mainstream mass media, and the anti-smoking nuts alike, if something like this, sure to stick in the craw of all four, were to be confirmed.