The Observer Gets Vaping

“In the moral panic over vaping,” writes Martha Gill in The Observer, “we risk forgetting that cigarettes kill.”

Dr Sarah Jackson is a Principal Research Fellow at the Behavioural Science and Health Institute of Epidemiology & Health at University College London. Regarding the piece, she described it as a “clearly written article”, adding that it “underscores the need to get the balance right when it comes to regulating vaping.”

Wisely, Gill begins by talking about the danger of alcohol, which claims 10,000 lives a year, and how coffee is an alternative drink that despite being mildly addictive and possibly containing carcinogens presents a fraction of the risk of booze.

And what if coffee products become popular among children?

“What to do? You make it illegal to sell coffee to under-18s, but children are still getting hold of it. So, what next? Drive up coffee taxes? Outlaw advertising? Put coffee in plain packaging? Forbid coffee on trains and in the street? Ban all but the bitterest brands? Is it really worth risking this public health miracle you have waited so long for?”

This is the problem vaping and tobacco harm reduction is now facing in the UK.

“In short, vapes have achieved what decades of government initiatives struggled to do. They are getting us to give up the cigs,” Gill says.

This isn’t fine, according to Matt Bury. The linguist took to Twitter/X to say: “Guardian smoker repeats vaping lobby propaganda points.”

He added that

• Vaping isn't safer: The longer-term effects are still unknown.
• It's encouraging millions of children & teens to consume nicotine.
• Vaping is as anti-social as smoking & should be banned in public spaces.

Bury followed up by adding: “The Guardian has been pressuring journalists to ‘do more with less’ for decades & it shows. They aren't even given the time to do proper research into articles & end up falling for lobbyists' arguments.”

Clearly nonsense – but it typifies the kind of attitude that has become prevalent thanks to mixed messaging from public health groups like Action on Smoking and Health and the misinformation pushed out by Bloomberg funded organisations.

In Nicotine vaping in England: 2022 evidence update, academics at King’s College London provided a clear and comprehensive summary of what research evidence has told us.

Overall conclusions:

• in the short and medium term, vaping poses a small fraction of the risks of smoking
• vaping is not risk-free, particularly for people who have never smoked
• evidence is mostly limited to short- and medium-term effects and studies assessing longer term vaping (for more than 12 months) are necessary
• more standardised and consistent methodologies in future studies would improve interpretation of the evidence

In E-cigarettes and harm reduction - An evidence review, the Royal College of Physicians say: “The large-scale use of e-cigarettes, predominantly in people trying to stop smoking, has been striking and has undoubtedly helped many thousands of people in the UK to avoid the painfully predictable morbidity and mortality from continued smoking.”

The RCP state:

• Since the 2016 RCP report the evidence of the effectiveness of e-cigarettes as an aid to quitting has become much stronger.
• Current evidence suggests nicotine itself confers little risk to health.
• Vaping remains overwhelmingly an activity of smokers and ex-smokers.
• Evidence from randomised controlled trials shows e-cigarettes with nicotine are more effective at helping people quit at 6 months or longer than nicotine replacement therapy.
• Changes in the prevalence of e-cigarette use in England have been positively associated with the success rate of quit attempts.
• E-cigarettes represent a cost-effective smoking cessation intervention.
• Using e-cigarettes for harm reduction to reduce morbidity and mortality from combustible tobacco is based on clear evidence that e-cigarettes cause less harm to health than combustible tobacco.

Then there is the Cochrane ‘living review’ of the evidence, an absolute gold standard in research, which finds that vapes are the best tool for quit smoking attempts and there is next to no evidence of long-term use risks. 

Gill completes her article by saying: “But let’s end with a cautionary tale from Australia, which made vapes prescription-only in 2021. What followed? A low uptake of prescription vapes, and a rise in smoking rates. Our victory over the cancer sticks is more fragile than we might think. Let us not endanger it.”

Photo Credit:

• Photo by Sierra Alpha Juliet on Unsplash, cropped, resized and Observer logo added

Dave Cross

Journalist at POTV

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Dave 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.