Public Health England changes its tone on smoking and Covid-19

Public Health England has just published what it calls ‘guidance’ for smokers and vapers.

I urge you to read it because the tone is noticeably different from the ‘story’ the under fire quango published on April 3.

Headlined ‘Smokers at greater risk of severe respiratory disease from Covid-19’, PHE declared that:

Emerging evidence from China shows smokers with Covid-19 are 14 times more likely to develop severe respiratory disease.

Now, eight weeks later, PHE says:

The evidence on smoking and coronavirus (Covid-19) is mixed and developing.

You can say that again, but it’s nice to hear PHE admit that the evidence is not as definitive as it made out before multiple studies suggested that “something weird” is going on.

‘On the available evidence,’ PHE now advise:

• if you smoke, you generally have an increased risk of contracting respiratory infection and of more severe symptoms once infected. Covid-19 symptoms may, therefore, be more severe if you smoke.

That, if I may say so, is a huge shift in tone. In fact, it’s as near an admission that PHE got it wrong on April 3 that we are likely to get. (That ‘story’ is still online, though, even though the study on which it was based used a sample of just 78 patients, only five of whom were or are smokers.)

Health Secretary Matt Hancock might also come to rue the ridiculously assertive statement he made in March when, prompted by Bob Blackman, chairman of the APPG on Smoking and Health, he declared with remarkable confidence, “It is abundantly clear that smoking makes the impact of a coronavirus worse."

Now that “abundantly clear” has been downgraded to “may”, let’s hope we hear rather less on the subject from anti-smoking campaigners and politicians.