GENEVA – World Health Organization’s (WHO) director of Health Promotion Ruediger Krech has said that studies claiming that smoking individuals are less susceptible to the novel coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 lung disease have significant methodological weaknesses.
In April, French scientists published a controversial study suggesting smoking might protect against catching the deadly virus.
“We were very surprised to see the uptake of highly reputed journals of these studies … [They] were not peer-reviewed and actually showed huge methodological weaknesses. They have really made the news around the globe, whereas about 20 other peer-reviewed studies and meta analyses showed exactly the opposite,” Krech told a virtual briefing on the occasion of the World No Tobacco Day celebrated on Sunday.
WHO has been persistently warning that smokers are more vulnerable and likely to develop severe forms of the illness.
