Slate reports:

Fikadu Tafesse wasn’t expecting to wake up on Wednesday to a text in which his former mentor blamed him for his children’s new interest in weed. Earlier this week, Tafesse, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Oregon Health & Science University, published evidence that some compounds found in cannabis plants could prevent the coronavirus from infecting cells. The internet latched onto the idea that weed might protect them from COVID: Twitter users made memes about the bong resin supposedly shielding their lungs from infection, Tafesse’s mentor’s children got wind of the miraculous healing powers of weed, and late-night hosts reveled in the incongruous simplicity of marijuana perhaps succeeding where hotly debated, ever-changing public health measures had failed.

And it would be simple, wouldn’t it? These days, CBD stores invade abandoned storefronts like an opportunistic mold; THC, the psychoactive compound in marijuana that makes users feel high, is now legal in 18 states. Little matter that the cannabinoid compounds tested in the study were CBDA and CBGA, not the more familiar CBD and THC—they all come from cannabis plants, in the end. Raw cannabis flower does contain CBDA and CBGA, as do CBD oils, albeit in small amounts.

But frequent users of cannabis products shouldn’t consider themselves immune, no matter how thick a layer of bong resin might coat their lungs. “That’s a complete misinterpretation,” Tafesse says. “This is just a lab study. We didn’t do any sort of clinical trial, or even [use] an animal model.”

What the researchers actually did was test whether CBDA and CBGA could, when mixed with cells in a dish, protect them from coronavirus infection. They had a good reason for doing so: They’d previously observed that these cannabinoids bind to the coronavirus spike protein, which the virus uses to latch onto and enter cells. Monoclonal antibodies also bind to this protein, and that’s how they protect people from COVID: With another molecule attached to it in the right way, the spike protein is effectively useless. With enough CBDA or CBGA mixed into cultured cells, Tafesse found, these compounds, too, could stop infection. [Continue reading…]