A major study published last year before the nationwide vaping panic has been retracted. The research was pulled by the American Heart Association’s Scientific Journal over concerns that the data was misleading and the conclusions unreliable.
Related: It’s Time to Vaporize the War on E-Cigarettes
The paper suggested that just as harmful to your health as smoking tobacco. Taken alongside a series of deaths resulting from third party ‘juice,’ the “we have to do something” crowd jumped into action.
Public interest resume padding is all part of that never let a crisis go to waste bilge so the progressives (in both parties) got to work. New Hampshire Democrats proposed new taxes and restrictions. Across our southern border, Massachusetts instituted a four-month ban on all vaping products.
New Hampshire appreciates the record-setting sales while noting that the Mass Ban could do more harm than good.
Bans popped up everywhere Democrats hold power. But we noted then that the problem was not vaping but aftermarket products. And we challenged the lefts knee-jerk orthodoxy.
Vaping has helped save more lives than we’ll ever count by helping people get off tobacco. No kids shouldn’t be vaping but then they aren’t supposed to smoke tobacco or drink alcohol. There are laws in place for that. But the compulsion to ban is a sad feature or leftwing politics.
As for the paper that got pulled, the author stands by his research but there are enough issues with the choice or research subjects to question the results. Many of the vapers who suffered heart attacks, for example, had been long term tobacco users before switching.
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.
Last month, several scholars at public-health schools including New York University, Yale, and King’s College London sent a letter to JAHA bringing attention to Rodu’s criticisms and asking for an appropriate investigation.
David Sweanor, an adjunct professor of law at the University of Ottawa who has studied the global tobacco industry for decades, was among those who signed the letter.
No one is saying vaping is without risk but then neither is alcohol or marijuana or driving to work. The point here is less about the bad research (of which there is much on many topics) but the political will to ride the nearest horse on the fastest course to some form of government control.
It is a tendency prominent in the Left and in a few too many on the right.
| Vice.com
