I don’t think I’d ever heard of the annual National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), conducted annually by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
But in 2018 it crashed into my life, as someone who had finally been able to quit smoking after 10 years, through the use of nicotine vapes.
That was the year that Scott Gottlieb, then commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), responded to the NYTS data by announcing that youth vaping was an “epidemic.” This pronouncement threw vaping into the headlines, making it Public Enemy Number One as panic over youth use exploded. A rash of restrictions and bans have followed.
Since then, I’ve made it my personal mission to scrutinize the data from this survey in order to effectively advocate for the products that saved my life.
This year’s release of NYTS data brought some of the worst and most inaccurate reporting I’ve ever seen.
Over the years, I’ve noticed a fundamental misunderstanding of the NYTS data—largely due to how they’re presented—by politicians, medical professionals, media and the general public alike. This year’s release of NYTS data brought some of the worst and most inaccurate reporting I’ve ever seen, with numerous media outlets reporting, for example, that “more than 1 in 4 teenagers used electronic cigarettes daily.”
That statistic is dead wrong. What the data actually show is that 2.5 percent of youth used e-cigarettes daily, not over 25 percent.
How could news outlets mess this up so badly?
Danielle Jones – Filter – 2022-11-11.
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