The intuition was probably that the risks from smoking were higher than that of covid.. For starters, not everyone is going to catch covid, but everyone taking

The intuition was probably that the risks from smoking were higher than that of covid.. For starters, not everyone is going to catch covid, but everyone taking up "preventive" smoking is going to become a smoker and be included in the well-known statistics relating to that. Also, people are extremely drawn to "indulgent" solutions.. The mental gymnastics we do to excuse "a little bit of X is healthy for Y" are astounding as long as X also just so happens to work on the brains reward systems.. Coffee, wine, chocolate, relaxation.. We're strongly motivated to seek out their benefits.. We're generally less motivated to do the same for plain water, healthy diet and exercise. Even hinting there might be _something_ _anything_ positive about smoking will in my opinion, without cause more people to take it up/keep it up and cause more self-harm than the good it could possible do for them. Is that a coverup ? Or is it simply not saying something that's basically going to be misunderstood to the point of being wrong? There are things that are true in very specific circumstances, but when uttered to the general public, will mean something entirely different and no longer be true.