Suzanne Humphries on covid: what the evidence says · JRE #2294
SUBJECT: COVID
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
What happens so the spike of COVID, which is the evil part of COVID, has all these horrible lab engineered proteins encoded into them and two of them are snake toxin proteins that bind on to your nicotinic receptors, okay? So if you can smoke nicotine or take nicotine gum, then you're gonna block those receptors up so that so you can trade off some of the stuff that's from the spine.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
There is a real scientific hypothesis, proposed by Changeux and colleagues, that one region of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is similar in sequence to a snake three-finger neurotoxin motif and may interact with nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, and molecular simulations plus partial electrophysiology support a subtype-specific interaction. That is very different from the claim as stated: the spike carries a single homologous sequence motif, not two snake toxin proteins, and there is no evidence any such sequence was lab engineered. The idea that nicotine is protective by blocking these receptors is an unproven and contested hypothesis, not an established treatment, and the supporting smoking epidemiology is disputed. Status: mostly false, the claim inflates a speculative sequence-homology hypothesis into engineered snake toxins and a proven nicotine remedy.