The February 2020 issue of the American Journal of Public Health contains a scathing indictment of vaping in a PERSPECTIVES (editorial) entitled, “Invalidity of an Oft-Cited Estimate of the Relative Harms of Electronic Cigarettes.”

The perspective was written by Dr. Thomas Eissenberg and several other scientists well-known for their anti-tobacco and anti-vaping views and consultancies for legal actions against the tobacco and vaping industries. On the surface, the Perspective warns that the vaping industry has changed since the reports of Nutt et al. (2014) and the 2015 Report by Public Health, and that current devices and e-liquids are harmful (e.g., “electronic cigarettes cause harm to cells”, “electronic cigarettes harm users”, “electronic cigarettes increase smoking risk”, and “electronic cigarette aerosol is not harmless”. In the final section of the Perspective, “call to action”, Eissenberg wrote, “The “95% safer” estimate is a “factoid”: unreliable information repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. Public health practitioners, scientists, and physicians should expose the fragile status of the factoid emphatically by highlighting its unreliable provenance and its lack of validity today, noting the many changes in e-cigarette devices and liquids, the accumulation of evidence of potential harm, the increased prevalence of use, and the growing evidence that e-cigarette use is associated with subsequent cigarette smoking.” According to Dr John Lauterbach, all concerned with the future of the vaping industry need to read Eissenberg's Perspective, its references, and the articles listed in the supplement.
by John H. Lauterbach, Ph.D., DABT