More Anti Ecig Smear
More Anti Ecig Smear: The wonderful people at CVS Health have advice for potential #ecig users
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by Dave Cross
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CVS’ position on vaping won’t surprise many given that they are part of the pharma industry suffering from declining sales of their poorly performing quit smoking products. What is slightly more bizarre are their claims that they hold public health higher than profits.
“We help people on their path to better health,” the company says in its Twitter account biography. This is the same account that recently posted a tweet stating: “Learn the facts about e-cigs ... and help us be the first tobacco free generation.” And with this opening gambit they conflate vaping with smoking – electronic cigarettes contain no tobacco and therefore contribute to a tobacco-free future.
The quotation in the image furthers this conflation: “They say e-cigs aren’t as bad. They said that about light cigarettes, too.” They conclusion they would like everybody to draw is that “they” are the nasty tobacco industry and yet it is common knowledge that Big Tobacco controls only a small aspect of the industry. The link to light cigarettes is fatuous, especially when one considers that the “they” saying vaping is safer includes Public Health England (the UK government body tasked with protecting and improving the nation’s health”.
Their 8,682 followers could possibly have seen the tweet and yet it garnered a mere ten retweets and nine likes: three of which were employees. The link takes readers to a document produced by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. The “truth” about e-cigs is, amazingly, anything but – it is yet more skewed bile disguised as information.
Advertising to children, flavours designed to entice kids and worrying stats warning of the rapid growth of vaping is a stock in trade play from the Pharma fear playbook. Cherry-picked surveys attempt to cast doubt on the efficacy of the ecig, supposed problems with dual-fuelling – and of course, not forgetting, the gateway effect!
As Michael Siegel says: “CVS Health is accusing me of scientific misconduct, since I have published research stating that vaping is not as harmful as smoking. Before making such an insinuation, I would hope that CVS Health has sufficient evidence to back up its claim. However, there is no evidence to back up the claim and there is strong evidence to refute the claim that e-cigarettes are just as harmful as cigarettes.”
Siegel goes on to demand CVS issue a retraction and correction but, given Pharma’s history on the topic we’ll be waiting a very long time to see it.
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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