The author has spent his entire career attacking anti-smoking campaigns both as an author and the reason why the Institute for Economic Affairs was Big Tobacco's favourite think tank, so assembling this sort of list of "evidence" is par for the course for him.
Back in the day when "long COVID" was an unknown phenomenon and vaccines a dim and distant dream, the medical profession had already spotted the interesting correlation and started nicotine supplement trials (anecdotally, my very non-scientific experiment with nicotine patches for lagging symptoms showed no evident effect). It's possible there's been a massive coverup, but it's also possible the health professionals reasoning just wasn't as highly motivated to see success in these trials and an absence of confounding data as Christopher Snowdon...
> Naturally, it is supportive of tobacco companies, given that they have been quite charitable to the institute. (This includes funding some of Roger Scruton's pro-tobacco publications.)[25] Being that it received funding from BP oil, it is no wonder that it also engaged in climate denialism: in 2019 The Guardian said the IEA had "published at least four books, as well as multiple articles and papers, over two decades suggesting manmade climate change may be uncertain or exaggerated".[26][27]
> t complained to media regulator Ofcom when radio presenter James O'Brien (hardly a Marxist firebrand) characterised it as a "hard-right lobby group for vested interests of big business, fossil fuels, tobacco, junk food" in 2019.[1] He also called an IEA spokesperson "some Herbert" and stated the IEA was of "questionable provenance, with dubious ideas and validity" and funded by "dark money". Ofcom judged that nothing O'Brien said was a distortion of the facts, and he had offered them a right of reply; the IEA's complaint was rejected.[28]
A few days, on the assumption that my body was taking too long to fight off the infection in which case the hypothesized property of inhibiting virus replication via ACE2 pathways might actually have been useful. Came to the conclusion that lingering symptoms were more post-viral stuff (as I said, only just starting to be recorded with respect to COVID at the time) so the nicotine was utterly pointless.
A slight nicotine buzz is hardly a huge acclimatisation (which was sort of the point of thinking it was low-risk to try) and I didn't exactly want to get used to it enough develop a dependency on it!
> Researchers think this may be due to nicotine’s ability to stop the release of inflammation-producing cells in the digestive tract. This anti-inflammatory action may, in turn, stop the immune system from mistakenly attacking good cells in the intestines.
Wow. That sounds very similar to some of the current theories of long covid.
Back in the day when "long COVID" was an unknown phenomenon and vaccines a dim and distant dream, the medical profession had already spotted the interesting correlation and started nicotine supplement trials (anecdotally, my very non-scientific experiment with nicotine patches for lagging symptoms showed no evident effect). It's possible there's been a massive coverup, but it's also possible the health professionals reasoning just wasn't as highly motivated to see success in these trials and an absence of confounding data as Christopher Snowdon...