The latest in our occasional/not-so-occasional series on prohibitionists getting owned by Community Notes on X is an interesting one.
A lot of the lies and misinformation that has been picked up in the last couple of weeks seems to show that those who want to present fake news about vaping either aren't learning from their past mistakes, or they don’t care.
In our last edition, we highlighted a post from Bloomberg-sponsored Parents Against Vaping, which implied that vaping has been known to cause acute lung damage: a claim that even the authorities that once claimed it have distanced themselves from.
But even though that post was swiftly rebuked by Community Notes, that hasn’t stopped prominent media personalities and TV networks repeating those claims.
Likewise, pretty much every post WHO has put up on vaping has been served with a Community Note. But that doesn’t seem to stop them. They continue to peddle complete falsehoods.
This week, we’ll take a look at the newest offenders.
More lung injury claims debunked: vaping does not lead to a double lung transplant
Jackson Allard, from the US, required a double lung transplant last October; and now believes vaping is to blame for his predicament based on (poor) advice from his medical team.
His warnings about vaping gained widespread media attention, including from the likes of Fox News and Conservative commentator Bill Mitchell, the latter retweeting the Daily Mail’s version of the story.
Trouble is, there’s no evidence whatsoever that vaping was involved. In fact both pieces explicitly mention the cause of Allard’s predicament: he developed parainfluenza, which led to pneumonia and then acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Published case reports of this disease do not substantiate that vaping was even an associated factor; much less vaping with nicotine.
As a reminder, the original outbreak of vaping-related lung injuries was caused by illegal cannabis vapes that were cut with vitamin-E acetate.
Perhaps this explains Allard’s statement to Fox News. The 22 year old told the network “I told my friend who smokes weed, I was like, be careful with that”.
The tweets from both Fox and Mitchell - who is the CEO of media network YourVoice America - were both served with Community Notes. But that didn’t stop each getting hundreds of thousands of impressions before the truth was forced upon them.
Obscure culture warrior professor gets cut down to size
The only people who have heard of Tahir Turk - an obscure professor at Dow University of Health Scientists in Pakistan - are the vaping community on X who he constantly baits with his unusually personal attacks on vapers, and for that matter, anyone else who disagrees with him.
He’s called public health professors who support harm reduction “spruiking for corporate drug pushers” and “tobacco industry front groups”, and he seems to take a weird kind of pleasure in the howls of discontent he gets in his comments from vapers who are neither.
Unfortunately, for vapers desperate to see their hate figure get what they think he deserves, he’s a relatively unimportant figure in the public health movement. So getting Twitter to take him seriously seems to have been challenging: for the most part, no one really bothers with him. Life’s too short.
But vapers finally got what they wanted when Turk claimed that the odds of future smoking are 3-6 times greater in younger vapers.
This is a fairly easy one to debunk, and Community Notes now shows a vast array of references substantiating the opposite: that vape users - including youth - do not go onto tobacco use and that vaping is a gateway out of smoking.
And finally, the WHO does it again.
This column wouldn’t be complete without yet another example of how WHO has lost its way.
We laugh on these pages, but there’s a serious point to all this. Trust in the organisation we expect to run the response to a global health emergency is paramount: just look at efforts to get a pandemic treaty signed off.
And yet, here they are, the world’s foremost public health authority, making false statement about vaping that are so easily debunked on X that it’s almost like they want to rack up community notes.
If we can’t trust them to get the science on vaping right - even if we disagree with their interpretation of it or with how they organise policy based on it - then how are we supposed to trust them when the stakes are at their highest?
Anyway, the latest iteration claimed that single use vapes can’t be recycled.
This is obviously nonsense, as anyone who lives in Europe knows well: it’s not only possible to recycle them, it’s mandatory for vendors to have systems in place to do just that.
But facts don’t seem to be of concern to the WHO, so Community notes had to step in and point out this fairly obvious fact that anyone with a brain could easily have googled.
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