Canada takes a wrong turn after a flawed paper induces moral panic about youth vaping and smoking

In June 2019, an influential and well-respected research group published a paper in the BMJ showing both a sharp rise in youth vaping in Canada between 2017 and 2018 – mirroring the rise in the United States. 

But the truly shocking finding was that there had also been a sharp rise in youth smoking (not seen in the United States).

Starting from well before publication, the paper had a strong negative influence on Canada’s approach to tobacco harm reduction, causing a reversal from a promising and insightful pro-public health approach to making ad hoc responses to a mounting moral panic.  Yet it turns out the smoking figures were wrong – a consequence of a flawed weighting procedure.

By July 2020, a correction had been issued in the BMJ noting that with revised weighting, smoking had, in fact, fallen.  But, absurdly, the correction was buried in a statistical supplement and the published paper still states, inaccurately, that youth smoking increased in its results and conclusion.  The discussion section of the paper continues to discuss an increase in smoking that never happened. Given the political salience of this paper, a proper correction or retraction and resubmission is essential.

In this blog post, I unpick what happened and when. I finish with thoughts on lessons for researchers using this type of research to promote regulatory policies.

1. Introduction
2. The paper in the British Medical Journal – 20 June 2019
3. Publicity for the BMJ paper – 18 December 2018 (six months before publication)
4. Official Canadian data diverges sharply from BMJ paper – 25 June 2019
5. BMJ rapid response and PubPeer comment on the official data – 9 July 2020
6. Publication of 2019 data with a radical revision of 2018 data – 4 May 2020
7. Technical paper – 5 May 2020
8. Correction to the BMJ paper – 10 July 2020
9. The (non) revision of the BMJ paper – 10 July 2020
10. Time to correct the record
11. Questions arising
12. What has gone wrong here? How should we look at youth vaping?
13. Advice to researchers using surveys to influence policy

Read full article here.

Clive Bates – The Counterfactual – July 23, 2020.