It’s been a while since we collected that latest prohibitionist fails on X. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been any recently. The disinformation scene has been alive and kicking, and we thought it was about time we shone a light on it again.
More disinformation from Canada about popcorn lung
We need to be clear before we start: there has never been a single recorded case of bronchiolitis obliterans - more commonly known as “popcorn lung” - attributed to vaping. Never. Not a single one in almost fifteen years of vapes being on the open market across the world.
And yet, here we are having to refute yet another claim that vaping causes popcorn lung by a supposedly respectable public health NGO: this time Alberta Lung in Canada, who told their followers that the condition “can still be caused by vaping today”.
Except…it can’t. The only time it’s ever been seen is in popcorn factories - hence the name - where workers who contracted the condition by inhaling a chemical called diacetyl for their entire working lives.
Anyone who reads the community note attached to Alberta Lung’s post will now know this.
Indian Government blatantly lies about relative risk
Despite their usually shameless nature, ask them point blank whether vaping is safer than smoking and the vast majority of the prohibitionist NGO class will grudgingly admit that vapes are - quite clearly - far less harmful.
However, it seems that the Indian Government has broken through that particular shamelessness barrier. I suppose this shouldn’t come as too much of a shock. India is the world’s second largest tobacco leaf exporter (after Brazil), selling over $800 million dollars of leaf tobacco overseas.
Fortunately, when the Indian Ministry of Health posted that vaping was not “a safer alternative to tobacco”, X users swiftly hit it with a community note citing the now numerous statements from the FDA, the UK National Health Service and the New Zealand Health Ministry, which show otherwise.
More silly comparisons to smoking
Kenyan Addiction Therapist and public health “expert” (according to his bio) felt compelled to tell the world that nicotine is very dangerous. Unfortunately, the graphic used to demonstrate this showed the effects of smoking, not nicotine.
As Community notes pointed out, nicotine is actually deemed an essential medicine by the WHO (which makes their anti-harm reduction stance all the more baffling).
Bloomberg shill can’t do math
But by far our favourite this round came from Dr Kelly Henning, who leads public health work at perennial anti-harm reduction NGO Bloomberg Philanthropies: which, as we always point out, is the plaything of US billionaire and former Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg.
Henning was alarmed by the news that teen vaping in the US had fallen dramatically and now stands at just 8%. Presumably worried that this might threaten the reason for her organisation’s existence, she took to X to complain that while this might be the case, 29.7% of high schoolers and 15.6% of middle schoolers reported daily use.
Now, anyone with a basic grasp of maths should be able to see the problem here. The only way those things could possibly be true at the same time would be if huge numbers of US teens were not attending school. Fortunately, the article posted by Henning to back up her claim did nothing of the sort: she’d simply muddled “daily use” numbers with “any use in the last 30 days” numbers. The sort of thing someone who works in public health should know the difference between.
