01/26/2022
New Study: Cannabis Compound CBD May Potentially Prevent, Fight COVID-19 Infection
Smoking ma*****na will not protect you from the novel coronavirus, no matter what anyone says and no matter how much certain people want it to be true.
However, if taken in the right way and at the right amount, the cannabis compound CBD might lessen the severity of COVID-19 infection and even prevent the virus’s spread, new research published this week found.
What’s more, new anecdotal evidence suggests that humans—not lab rats, and not isolated human cells, but human beings—who were prescribed regular high-potency doses of pharmaceutical-grade CBD were less likely to contract COVID,
These findings are fueling a misconception that smoking cannabis or taking over-the-counter CBD drops are a useful tool against COVID. They’re not.
What the findings may mean that cannabis-derived medicines or preparations might supplement vaccines in the struggle to end the nearly two-year-long COVID-19 pandemic.
But—and researchers cannot stress this enough—what it does not mean is that smoking a joint treats COVID. And your over-the-counter CBD drops won’t, either.
In interviews, researchers highlighted both the potential significance of their work as well as its limitations.
What this says is that CBD has the potential to prevent infections, such as breakthrough infections, which might be one of the most useful applications.
However, the findings were limited to just CBD—and just to certain high-grade CBD preparations that deliver a very large dose of the compound.
Going to your corner bakery and buying some CBD cookies or gummy bears probably won't do anything.
Nothing in the study indicates CBD is a replacement for existing preventative measures, such as masking and vaccinations—
Researchers treated human lung cells with CBD prior to infecting them with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And they found that CBD potently inhibited viral replication under non-toxic conditions and that other cannabinoids, including psychoactive THC did not do this. Only CBD was a potent agent.
How did CBD do this? The cannabinoid appears to activate a cellular stress response normally triggered in the presence of viruses or other pathogens. This stress response produces a series of proteins called interferons. CBD induces the production of interferons, and they are the antivirals that will fight the virus.
CBD also prevented the virus from making other changes to infected host cells.
But cells are cells—they’re not living beings. To test the findings on living beings—something last week’s study did not do—female mice were given two loads of CBD: 20 or 80 mg per kilogram of body weight.
That’s a fairly substantial dose that could be exorbitantly expensive: A 150-pound person would have to take a heroic 5,440 milligrams of CBD to match the mice—and some companies sell 10,000 milligrams, or less than two doses, for $250.
Nevertheless, some will argue that’s money and CBD well spent.
According to the researchers, mice that took 80 milligrams of CBD per kilo of weight saw decreases of viral loads in the lungs and the nose up to “40- and 4.8-fold.”
And, finally, there is some evidence that these mice and test-tube studies will translate to people.
Epidiolex is a CBD-based pharmaceutical drug approved for prescription by the federal Food and Drug Administration for patients with severe seizure disorder.
A review of 1,212 patients in a dataset called the National COVID Cohort Collaborative revealed showed that the COVID infection rate among people with a “medication record” of taking pharmaceutical-grade CBD was 6.2 percent, compared to 8.9 percent for people not taking CBD, the researchers wrote.
But CBD’s preventative potential was even more pronounced for people who took CBD the same day as their COVID-19 tests. For a subset of 531 patients “who were likely taking” 100 milligrams of CBD, their positivity rate was 4.9 percent, compared to rate of 9 percent among a control group not taking the drug.
Going forward, Rosner and her colleagues are hoping that clinical trials with humans can begin—and begin soon, as the pandemic grinds on through historic-high levels of infections and hospitalizations, a dreadful winter spike fueled by the omicron variant.
It is encouraging to see some clinical trials on this subject finally get off the ground, especially as we are seeing that the pandemic is still nowhere near the end. Now it is just a matter of time for them to determine whether this generally safe, well-tolerated, and non-psychoactive cannabinoid might have anti-viral effects against COVID19.
