The last condition of the exclusion criteria is "Use of tobacco or nicotine containing products in excess of the equivalents of 5 cigarettes per day or 2 chews of tobacco per day", which seems somewhat related.
I wonder what the metabolic argument is (if any). Maybe it's something else. Really interesting regardless -- anyone know why there's this restriction?
COVID has a serious effect on one's lungs. Smoking does as well. I'm sure they would prefer to see how the medicine works on healthy subjects as a baseline. If it doesn't have the same effect on smokers as the baseline, then you can infer from that. If you just get tainted samples from "diseased" lungs of smokers in the original testing, then that could skew the results. That would be my SWAG.
The last condition of the exclusion criteria is "Use of tobacco or nicotine containing products in excess of the equivalents of 5 cigarettes per day or 2 chews of tobacco per day", which seems somewhat related.