| It feels like a little too late. Science has to wait on controls, and that is difficult to do with a new disease. Civilian science/shitposters were promoting tea and catechins since early 2020, but such information was classified as dangerous misinformation by the authorities fighting an "infodemic". https://justpaste.it/8bq9r > If smelling not good is a bit of a problem, then raw apples, lemons, spinach, lettuce, green tea and chew gum would help a bit > Significant inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 by a green tea catechin, a catechin-derivative and galloylated theaflavins in vitro > Preferably only tea and not tea extract pills, as the latter have a chance to cause liver injury > results strongly suggest that EGCG, and more remarkably TSA and galloylated theaflavins, inactivate the novel coronavirus > Teas contain Epigallocatechin-gallate (EGCG) which is a zinc ionophore that helps your cells to absorb zinc that halts viral replication in your cells. > Antiviral activity of [green tea] and plant juices ([black chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa) juice], [pomegranate (Punica granatum) juice]) against SARS-CoV-2 and influenza virus in vitro > Green tea, muscadine grapes, cacao powder, and dark chocolate - able to bind to a particular enzyme, or protease, in the virus and stop it reproducing > To further substantiate the inhibitory activities, extracts prepared from [green tea (GT), two muscadine grapes (MG), cacao, and dark chocolate (DC)], which are rich in CAG, ECG, GAG, EGCG, or/and PB2, were used for inhibitory assay. |
The paper is showing about a 100x reduction in infectivity from exposure to saliva collected “0 minutes” after drinking tea. That’s a very small effect. Compare to, say, penicillin, which will kill viruses in the levels present in your blood and tissue hours after taking a small pill.
Or, for a different comparison, I don’t know of anyone testing a handgun against COVID (sorry, xkcd), but pool water and presumably chlorinated tap water reduces infectivity by at least 1000x in 30 seconds:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8480993/
Maybe one could use these compounds in tea as a basis to try to develop a useful antiviral drug. But numbers like this don’t make it look like the pandemic could have been averted by telling everyone to drink four cups of tea a day or to continuously gargle chlorinated tap water.
(Seriously, I doubt there were evil authorities out there trying to get people not to drink lots of tea so they could drum or support for mask mandates or quantitative easing or whatever other measures seem horrible. This whole concept seems utterly absurd. And at least opening a window or using a MERV 13 or N95 or better seem like more justifiable public health measures than distributing free bottles of iced tea!)