Monday 20 January 2020

America's anti-vaping scam

It took five months, but the US Centers for Disease Control has finally faced reality:

CDC no longer recommending people avoid all e-cigarettes, focuses on THC-containing products

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed verbiage from its website this week suggesting that people refrain from all vaping products during its investigation into vaping-related lung injury.
The CDC previously urged people to consider refraining from the use of all e-cigarette or vaping products. Now the agency is focusing on THC-containing products.

This, and the role of Vitamin E acetate in the epidemic, was obvious a very long time ago to anyone who was paying attention.

Donald Trump reportedly regrets getting involved...

President Trump told his health secretary yesterday that he regrets getting involved in the administration's policy on vaping, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. "I should never have done that f***ing vaping thing," Trump said during an impromptu call on speakerphone in an Oval Office meeting.

Never mind. For the neo-prohibitionists, it's job nearly done. The FDA is banning flavoured vape cartridges. When this fails to slash youth vaping rates, they will push for a ban on all flavored vapes and/or all cartridge devices. San Francisco has already banned all vape products. Several states have banned all flavoured vape juices.

Future generations will be amazed at how easily a moral panic was orchestrated against e-cigarettes in 2019. Take Michael Bloomberg, for instance. Last September, he appeared on CBS News with Matt Myers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Barely a word of truth passed his lips. You can watch the interview below.



I won't fisk the whole thing but the following quotes give you an idea of the incorrigible dishonesty of he and his kind:

"All the progress we've made in reducing teen smoking in particular is being turned around because the kids like the flavour in the vaping products."

In fact, the biggest rise in vaping (in 2014) coincided with the biggest fall in cigarette smoking. There was a tiny rise in the smoking rate in 2018, but it then fell to just 5.8 per cent in 2019. This is a third of the rate it was before e-cigarettes arrived on the scene.

Bloomberg didn't have the data for 2019 when he did his interview, but I'm sure he'll use some of his vast wealth to set the record straight now...

Asked whether he stood by his claim that "tobacco companies are behind" the rise in underage vaping, he said:

"Oh, there's no question about that! They're advertising to kids. They run these enormous ads everyday in the paper saying 'we'll help you stop smoking', but they've never released any evidence whatsoever that it does anything to help you stop smoking."

They don't need to. There is plenty of evidence that e-cigarettes help people smoking. See, for example, this, this and this.

"In fact most people that vape never smoked before."

False. Most vapers are current or former smokers, as Konstantinos Farsilinos points out:

In all countries where e-cigarette use in the population has been monitored we find that e-cigarette use is largely confined to current and former smokers while use by never smokers is rare. For the US, I present below a graph with official data from the 2016 and 2017 (pooled) National Health Interview Survey, a population-representative US survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics. The graph shows that the vast majority of e-cigarette users are current or former smokers.

Bloomberg also came up with this bizarre factoid, apparently off the top of his head...

"Just think if your kid was doing this and winds up with an IQ 10 or 15 points lower he or she would have had for the rest of her life..."

This is lie is worthy of the quacks of Scientific Temperance Instruction. When asked if this has been demonstrated scientifically, even Matthew Myers couldn't bring himself to defend it.

And so it goes on. The American people have been conned by a shower of smooth talking charlatans. 

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