An investigation by The BMJ uncovered undisclosed financial links between certain authors and the tobacco and e-cigarette industry in a number of COVID research papers, which had suggested that smokers were less likely to develop COVID.
In April 2020, two French studies (in preprint and not yet peer reviewed) suggested that nicotine might have a protective effect against COVID, which was coined the ‘nicotine hypothesis’.
The studies were reported on widely by the media, causing fears that it could undermine decades of tobacco control. What should have been an opportunity for promoting cessation of this practice which every year kills five million people around the world.
Since then, the ‘nicotine hypothesis’ has been soundly disproved, with several studies showing that, to the contrary, smoking is associated with an increased chance of COVID related death.
Journalists Stéphane Horel and Ties Keyze investigated the circumstances of these reports. They pointed out that one of the study authors, Professor Jean-Pierre Changeux, has a history of receiving funding from the Council for Tobacco Research, whose purpose was to fund research that would cast doubt on the dangers of smoking and focus on the positive effects of nicotine.
From 1995 to 1998, documents from the tobacco industry show that Changeux’s laboratory received $220,000 (£155,000; €180,000) from the Council for Tobacco Research.
When approached by The BMJ, Changeux assured them that he has not received any funding linked “directly or indirectly with the tobacco industry” since the 1990s.
In late April 2020, Greek researcher Konstantinos Farsalinos was the first to publish the ‘nicotine hypothesis’ formally in a journal, in an editorial in Toxicology Reports.
That journal’s editor in chief, Aristidis Tsatsakis was a co-author, as was A Wallace Hayes, who in 2013 had been a member of Philip Morris International’s scientific advisory board, and had served as a paid consultant to the tobacco company.
Another co-author is Konstantinos Poulas, head of the Molecular Biology and Immunology Laboratory at the University of Patras, where Farsalinos is affiliated.
The laboratory has been receiving funding from Nobacco, the market leader in Greek e-cigarettes and the exclusive distributor of British American Tobacco’s nicotine delivery systems since 2018. However, in their published scientific articles, neither Farsalinos nor Poulas had ever declared this Nobacco funding.
Yet the journalists showed that two grants were attributed in 2018 by the Foundation for a Smoke Free World—a non-profit established by tobacco company Philip Morris International in 2017—to ‘Patras Science Park’.
The grants, which according to tax documents came close to €83 000, went to NOSMOKE, a university start-up incubator headed by Poulas, which markets an ‘organic’ vaping product.
Last month, the European Respiratory Journal retracted a paper with Poulas and Farsalinos as co-authors, after two other authors failed to disclose conflicts of interest.
The retracted article had found that “current smoking was not associated with adverse outcome” in patients admitted to hospital with COVID, and it claimed that smokers had a significantly lower risk of acquiring the virus.
The foundation has invested heavily in the COVID/nicotine hypothesis, said Horel and Keyzer.
In June 2020 it set aside €900 000 for research “to better understand the associations between smoking and/or nicotine use, and COVID-19 infection and outcome.”
Its request stated that the pandemic offered “both an opportunity and a challenge for individuals to quit smoking or transition to reduced risk nicotine products.”
They concluded that, in 2021, “amid a global lung disease pandemic, tobacco industry figures are increasingly pushing the narrative of nicotine as the solution to an addiction that they themselves created, with the aim of persuading policy makers to give them ample room to market their “smoke-free” products. This makes studies on the hypothetical virtues of nicotine most welcome indeed.”
Source: Medical Xpress
Article information: Covid 19: How harm reduction advocates and the tobacco industry capitalised on the pandemic to promote nicotine, The BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.n1303 , www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1303
