Just because A is true doesn’t mean it follows smoking is a useful or recommended treatment. But it might lead to insights that drive future treatments.
I find the pervasiveness of this idea fascinating since it usually falls apart on backtesting. There are tons of elites who get taken in by Ponzi schemes (just look at Madoffs client list), lots of very well connected people lost a ton of money in 08, lots of celebrities use Goop products, etc.
Are there counter examples? I have not found much evidence that there’s some secret elites-only repository of knowledge.
We'd only see that if the cumulative risk from smoking and maybe-covid was greater than the cumulative risk from vaccination and maybe-covid, and if the marginal risk from vaccination if one were already a smoker was negative.
As is, I expect this is true, but that the harms of smoking outweigh the decreased risk of covid by quite a lot, so this isn't actionable at the individual level, though it may be actionable for research into biological pathways.
Err, that's not even close to factual. Donald Trump touted the vaccines before they were released, got publicly vaccinated, publicly discussed getting his booster shots, and touted their effectiveness in interviews:
Example: “Look, the results of the vaccine are very good, and if you do get (Covid), it’s a very minor form. People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine,” he said in an interview with The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens that was released Tuesday.
He got his booster in secret too: https://theintercept.com/2021/12/21/trump-admits-he-got-vacc...
Come back to actual reality please, you're inventing an alternate universe.