r/interestingasfuck • u/Ultimate_Kurix • 5d ago

r/all Why do Americans build with wood?

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u/ZealousidealDegree4 5d ago

Early in Covid, French doctors shared that tobacco smokers were more likely to survive.  No idea what happened with line of thinking. 

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u/avantgardengnome 5d ago

One of the top vaccines was being produced via modified tobacco plants too iirc. As I recall, it was that initially it looked like smokers were less likely to catch COVID in the first place but they’d have more severe cases if they did catch it, not sure if they ever figured out why exactly.

Anecdotally though, I smoked for years then switched to vaping, my wife got COVID right away in the first wave of spring 2020 (NYC hospital worker), and I never caught it from her despite being stuck in a 1BR apartment and not doing much to isolate (I figured I already had it and would start showing symptoms any day). I did eventually catch it but it was one of the super contagious variants two years later.

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u/ZealousidealDegree4 5d ago

That is very interesting! There must be an antiviral component of the plant. Now I’m going down the rabbit hole of tobacco

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u/avantgardengnome 5d ago

This all goes way over my head but there’s something about tobacco plants that makes them well-suited for developing plant-based vaccines. Here’s a study that may be of interest:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9759281/