“We have to seize this moment,” said Laurie Rubiner, executive vice president of the Bloomberg-funded Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
She was speaking earlier this month, when the National Medical Association (NMA) held a webinar titled, ”COVID-19: Accelerating the urgency of anti-vaping initiatives.”
Why—amid an unprecedented pandemic that has killed 60,000 Americans, stressed hospitals to the point of collapse and left thousands of frontline healthcare providers without personal protective equipment (PPE)—would the NMA choose to hold that webinar? Vaping nicotine doesn’t kill, and hasn’t been identified as a risk factor in contracting the coronavirus (in fact, emerging evidence suggests the opposite).
Why not host a webinar to accelerate initiatives to help people quit smoking, a known killer of almost 500,000 disproportionately poorer Americans every year? Or a webinar on the critically important issue of racial disparities in COVID-19 deaths? The NMA represents African-American physicians and seeks to be a “leading force for parity and justice in medicine and the elimination of disparities in health.”
Rubiner’s rambling Zoom presentation on vaping for the NMA event was full of lies, like “youth who vape are potentially more vulnerable to symptoms of COVID-19.” But her call to seize the moment was part of a coherent plan.
Helen Redmond – Filter – April 30, 2020.
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