Anti-E-Cigarette Puritans Put Lives at Risk
Bottom Line: Public health officials are using similar tactics to the tobacco industry to spread the misleading claim that e-cigarettes are “no less harmful” than combustible tobacco products. This false narrative will lead to fewer smokers switching to safer alternatives, resulting in more smokers' deaths, while public health officials face few repercussions. One reason might be a puritanical mindset against products smokers can enjoy while ceasing to smoke.
Government authorities have repeatedly made egregiously alarmist and incorrect messaging about the relative safety of e-cigarettes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has repeatedly made false claims about the evidence, fabricated research, and issued cherry-picked data intended to scare.
To this day, the FDA website contains a statement that “All tobacco products are harmful to your health, despite what they taste, smell, or look like,” a wildly inaccurate claim that conflates all forms of tobacco—combustible or non-combustible—with smoking.
The World Health Organization also mixes up tobacco and smoking, tweeting on January 5, 2018, that “tobacco is the only product that kills half of its consumers." However, this statement actually only applies to smoking, not non-combustible products like e-cigarettes or snus. In fact, snus has contributed to Sweden having the lowest lung cancer rates of any European Union (EU) member nation (since it is banned everywhere else in the EU). But they persist with this messaging that scares the public, including smokers, away from e-cigarettes because, unfortunately, the tactic works.''
In 2012 polls found that only 12 percent of adults thought e-cigarettes were as harmful as or more harmful than smoking, but by 2015 that number had jumped to 35 percent. By 2018, 50 percent—half of all adults—held this mistaken belief with another 17 percent unsure. In other words, thanks to information disseminated by public health officials, the people most likely to benefit from trying e-cigarettes mistakenly believe there is no benefit in switching to vaping.
In reality, the best scientific evidence shows that e-cigarettes are significantly safer than traditional smoking. In 2015, after reviewing the evidence, Public Health England declared that the existing e-cigarettes were at least 95 percent less harmful than smoking. The following year UK’s Royal College of Physicians even recommended that doctors encourage their smoking patients to use e-cigarettes.
In early 2018 the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) issued a consensus statement on e-cigarettes after reviewing more than 800 studies on the topic. NASEM found “conclusive evidence” that switching from combustible to vaporized sources of nicotine reduces exposure to harmful toxicants and “substantial evidence” that switching entirely from smoking to vaping results in “reduced short-term adverse health outcomes in several organ systems.”
In January 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study in which nearly 900 smokers at stop smoking clinics in the U.K. were randomized into groups receiving e-cigarettes or nicotine-replacement products (NRTs) such as nicotine patches, gum, lozenges, or nasal sprays. After a year the researchers found that participants in the e-cigarette group remained abstinent from smoking at twice the rate of those in the NRT group (18.8 to 9.9 percent).
Read the full report here.
