Quote of the day - how bad science and unquestioning journalism might just kill people

From an excellent review of the awful, ignorant moral panic over vaping in the USA:

Journalists' failure to do so during debates over secondhand smoke got smokers banished to the fringes of social spaces. By repeating this failure in the debate over lower-risk competitors to the cigarette, journalists may get those smokers killed.

Absolutely. The UK is unusual, if not unique, in having adopted a largely evidence-based approach to vaping (it's much less harmful than smoking so smokers switching is a big health plus). In the USA we have a profoundly ignorant panic that is destroying what a month or so ago were legitimate businesses employing thousands and, as the quote above reminds us, probably killing tens of thousands of smokers who might otherwise have switched.

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