Rationale for Nicotine Patch in Treatment of Long-COVID and Vaccine Injury Syndromes

Simple Intervention Provides Hope for Amelioration of Cognitive and Somatic Symptoms

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

In my practice, most patients with post-acute sequelae after SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination are on the McCullough Protocol Base Spike Detoxification. The word “base” is important because it signifies that in addition to triple therapy with nattokinase, bromelain, and curcumin, other drugs and interventions can be added to reduce the intensity and duration of symptoms while the root cause of the syndrome (Spike protein) is being cleared from the body.

Leitzke summarized the literature on post-acute sequelae being related to residual SARS-CoV-2 interactions with the ACE-2 receptor as well as nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChR).

Changeux et al. (2020) recently proposed a ´nicotine hypothesis´, which implicates the propensity of SARSCoV-2 to not only bind to ACE2-receptors (ACE2R) but to nicotinic AChRs, as well (Changeux et al. 2020). Viral particles competing with acetylcholine for nAChR binding in order to enter the human body may lead to primary neuro infection (Changeux et al. 2020; Steardo et al. 2020). Furthermore, among the severe and fatal cases of COVID-19, the proportion of nicotine consumers was significantly lower than non-consumers of nicotine (Miyara, et al. 2020). Since nicotine may protect nAChRs from viral attachment, therapeutic nicotine application was proposed in the management of acute COVID-19 infections (Changeux et al. 2020). This argument is convincingly supported by the cohort study of Hippisley-Cox et al. (2020), with a total of 8.28 million participants (including 19,486 confirmed COVID-19 cases), showing lower odds for COVID-19 infection and COVID-19-related ICU stay in association with smoking (Hippisley-et al. 2020).

Nicotine binds to nAChR and works to competitively antagonize Spike protein while at the same time upregulating nAChR.