Virtually everyone acknowledges that smoking is bad news for your health — but it’s really hard to stop once you’ve started. Vaping offers the greatest opportunity in decades to reduce tobacco-related diseases and help people quit traditional cigarettes. But unfortunately, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is pushing a misinformation campaign to kill vaping, using bad science and the inflated threat of underage tobacco use to fearmonger against e-cigarettes.
Vaping causes seizures. At least, that’s the fake scare-story the FDA sold some major news outlets earlier this month. Yet 35 such cases over nine years is far from being a statistically significant figure — bees kill over twice as many people every year. Several of the cases, too, involved people with histories of seizures or drug use drugs. And it’s not like the seizures always occurred while people were vaping. In some cases, it was a full day later. The FDA itself said the speculative link between vaping and seizures wasn’t really grounded in reality.
Truth be told, if only 35 cases were observed over nine years, the same logic can be used to make the opposite argument: vaping might, in fact, prevent the risk of seizure. At 10.8 million users and a rate of 3.88 seizures per year, it seems e-cigarette users are two million times less likely to have a seizure than the general population.
Still, fear-mongering is a classic technique in the realm of healthcare reporting. Yet this is foolish, as it’s an area with plenty of genuine, pressing issues — make-believe ones are hardly needed. When real health tragedies happen every day, it seems indecent to spin baseless speculation into a headline story.
Exaggerating the severity of a problem in the effort of catching public attention and bringing awareness to a harmful trend is one thing. It’s quite another to paint a highly effective alternative like vaping as a great danger and make it an imaginary public health threat — when it’s not.
While traditional smoking kills close to half a million individuals annually, shooting down the vaping industry seems trite. Indeed, smoking traditional cigarettes is the number one cause of preventable death in the U.S. Cigarettes are packed with harmful substances, such as hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and lead. None of these are present in e-cigarettes, and they’re the chemicals that cause cancer, not nicotine.
Why, then, is the FDA so adamantly opposed to vaping? The seizure accusations seem to be an attempt from the FDA to scrounge up a scientific argument against vaping. Until recently, the agency’s campaign relied on a single concern: a supposed epidemic of teenage vaping.
High school students were starting to use e-cigarettes in increasing rates, and the FDA wanted to stop this trend. This urge is understandable: Teenagers using tobacco products seems objectively negative. So, limiting advertisers’ ability to appeal to the youth is hardly reprehensible. But the agency allowed inflated concerns over teenage vaping to hijack what had begun as a productive conversation.
The FDA’s opinion on vaping has only recently switched. Initially, the FDA took a clear stance in favor of vaping and made it easier for would-be e-cigarette manufacturers to put their products on the market. A few months ago, it was still praising the harm-reduction potential of vaping, saying that traditional smoking rates could be expected to decrease from 15.1% to 1.4% thanks to the new devices. But the FDA has changed its mind — to the detriment of a lot of people who want to quit smoking cigarettes.
The agency must stop using fear to scare people away from life-saving technology. Yes, teenage vaping should be discouraged and any actual issues with seizures addressed. But that doesn’t excuse the FDA’s ridiculous exaggerations.
Elise Amez-Droz is a Young Voices contributor and a health care policy associate in the Washington DC metro area.
