For several years, respected voices in the public health community have warned of a breakdown in trust in their profession if the dishonest, damaging, and often vicious campaign against safer alternatives to smoking by some of their colleagues continues to misinform the public.
It is no surprise, therefore, that an editorial was recently published in the journal Addiction (authored by a group of public health experts from five major U.S. universities, as well as the Iowa Attorney General) criticizing the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and U.S. Surgeon General (SG) for tolerating misinformation about vaping.
The authors highlight an advisory from the SG earlier this year, which declare that “[h]ealth misinformation is a serious threat to public health” and that countering it “is a moral and civic imperative.” The authors then note that the same SG’s office is guilty of promoting false claims that vaping is a gateway to youth smoking and that the CDC continues to falsely attribute a 2019 outbreak of lung injuries to nicotine vaping products.
This is not the first time that the CDC has been requested to cease spreading false information about vaping. In 2021, a group of 75 multidisciplinary experts wrote to the agency to ask that they clarify that nicotine vaping was not to blame for the 2019 outbreak, but the taxpayer-funded agency declined to do so. To this day, the CDC continues to sit by and allow widespread misinformation to prevail in the media and amongst conflicted academics.
Martin Cullip – RealClear Policy – 2023-01-10.
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