At the beginning of March 2020, with the publication of the first Chinese epidemiological studies on the determinants of a severe form of COVID-19, tobacco smoking consistently appeared as one of the most important avoidable risk factors for a poorer prognosis [1,2]. COVID-19 was going to be added to the long list of diseases caused by smoking and was becoming the latest key argument to recommend avoiding tobacco use and quitting smoking [1,3,4]. However, Lippi and Henry [5] published in the European Journal of Internal Medicine a meta-analysis with an unequivocal title: “Active smoking is not associated with severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)”.
