Where there’s smoke – the cigarettes-and-Covid story is growing harder to ignore

FTA:

“The different endpoints suggest that nicotine might be lowering viral load, or something of that nature, and nicotine is known to have some funky immunological effects. But the benefit, if it exists, can’t be attributed to nicotine until that’s established independently.”

Fortunately this might be easy to test given that transdermal nicotine patches can deliver nicotine without the associated smoke, tar, morning cough, etc. that the article mentions in passing. I’m curious how this plays out.

There are a lot of additives in cigarettes, some of which suppress symptoms of the damage smoking does to the lungs. So it's possible that it's not the nicotine at all. Should be easy to test by looking at data from people who had COVID-19 and were using nicotine patches at the time.

I'm wondering about the different types of tobacco being used, such as pipe vs cigarette, as those have different patterns of use. One of the studies I read collected that data but didn't report those comparisons.