When the coronapsychosis hit peak hysteria in early 2020, medical researchers began to observe a baffling medical anomaly regarding the supposedly novel and lethal respiratory disease. Regular smokers were grossly underrepresented among those hospitalised or seeking outpatient treatment.

Researchers in China and France swiftly came to the startling conclusion that nicotine may have protected smokers against the novel coronavirus. The French study discovered that just 5 percent of those hospitalised for Covid-19 were daily smokers as opposed to 25.4 percent of the French population who puffed daily. According to lead researcher Zahir Amoura: "Basically, we have 80 percent fewer smokers in Covid patients than in the general population of the same sex and the same age."

Personally, I could not find a serious flaw in the French methodology and this excerpt shows why:

Smoking status was collected and patients were specifically asked whether they were current smokers (and if so, to provide details on their smoking habits: daily or occasional smoking, type of tobacco products used, number of daily cigarettes), former smokers, or not smokers ever). Daily smokers are individuals reporting daily smoking or reporting a daily frequency of the number of cigarettes (manufactured or rolled) or other tobacco products (cigars, cigarillos, pipe, shisha). Occasional smokers are individuals reporting infrequent, but not daily smoking. The group of ex-smokers included anyone having smoked in the past, occasionally or daily, and had abstained from smoking prior to the time of investigation. The term "never smoker" designated people who had never smoked. The quantities of tobacco smoked were calculated using the following equivalences: 1 cigar = 1 cigarillo = 2 cigarettes.

The French general population was used as a reference to compute the Standardized Incidence Ratio (SIR).

According to RT.com, this discovery was backed by more "extensive data collected from the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris and La Pitié" in April 2020 which revealed that "of 11,000 patients hospitalised with the virus, just 8.5 percent were smokers". Two Chinese papers published earlier revealed similar patterns. One of them concluded that "only 12.6 percent of 1,000 Covid-19 patients were smokers, even though smokers comprised 28 percent of the Chinese population". This was a highly counterintuitive revelation.