The bit of “science”-y content that fueled governent’s current vape panic…
Last June, the authors, Stanton Glantz and Dharma Bhatta of the University of California San Francisco, stated in the original study that vaping and smoking cigarettes posed a similar risk, while doing both at the same time was an even more dangerous option. Following its publication in the summer, the peer-reviewed research was referenced by major news organizations, including CNN, Yahoo News, and USA Today.
In a statement explaining the retraction, editors at the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) expressed worry that the study may have been based on misleading data.
“The editors are concerned that the study conclusion is unreliable,” they wrote.
JAHA pulled the paper after Brad Rodu, a tobacco control expert at the University of Louisville, noted that many of the vapers Glantz and Bhatta analyzed for the study were also current or former smokers. Rodu argued that there was a possibility that the use of combustible cigarettes is what made them more likely to suffer heart attacks
I bring this up not so much to troll the city full of puritan prohibitionists who’ve been hacking away at vaping in legislatures and city councils around the state – although I am.
Mostly, though, it’s about the wave of virtue-signaling third-rate “progressive” “thinkers” who affect “evidence-based” as their latest intellectual accessory – and don’t get the the sarcasm when you point out that the Flat Earth is “evidence-based”, if your evidence is flawed enough,.
This really irritates me because so many people bought the propaganda that was spread – no, propagated – by the nice suburban upper middle-class white women on channels 4, 5, 9, and 11. Along with the slight oversight of what drugs exactly were being vaped.
Thanks for covering this, Mitch.
a tobacco control expert at the University of Louisville…
How does one become a tobacco expert? What are they expert at? Does this require a PhD? Or, is it all experiential? Is it focussed on cigarettes, or pipe, cigar, and chew as well?
Looking online, the only experts appear to be witnesses, many with doctorates.
Scary thing is that the misinformation is getting into nursing and medical schools–my eldest was taught unequivocally about the hazards without anyone even attempting a calculation of relative risk, or admitting the fact that many smokers are using vaping as a way to “step down” from the cancer sticks, or for that matter even asking why people love nicotine so much.
The Left is big on junk-science, it seems. Stephen Milloy’s got a whole website devoted to people who make policy or affect policy while simultaneously not understanding the difference between correlation and causation.
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A decade ago vaping didn’t exist. Now, Governor Walz is on TV lamenting how large of a problem teen vaping is now compared to just a few years ago, but Walz doesn’t acknowledge that it was impossible to have a vaping problem before vaping existed.