Bogus E-cigarette Panic Literally Killing People

By Michelle Minton of CEI. Excerpt:

"Justified by the need to scare teenagers away from e-cigarettes, government health agencies and preeminent health bodies have relentlessly engaged in a campaign of misinformation, exaggeration, and outright lying about e-cigarettes. Their hope was to make vaping seem far more dangerous than the evidence indicates. And they’ve succeeded.

“Scientists have been working hard to debunk the belief that e-cigarettes are less harmful than traditional cigarettes,” the American Lung Association (ALA) noted in a recent post. Yet, despite this hard work by ostensibly objective scientists, they haven’t yet been able to refute the large and growing body of evidence that vaping is less harmful than smoking. Failing to verify their alternative facts, they have instead turned to baseless fear-mongering.

Perhaps the most egregious example of anti-vaping advocates’ willingness to set facts aside is their repeated claim that vaping causes “popcorn lung” (bronchiolitis obliterans), a rare and debilitating lung disorder. The claim is based on the fact that some e-cigarettes contain the flavoring agent diacetyl. Diacetyl has been linked to popcorn lung, but primarily in factory workers at microwave popcorn plants (hence the name) exposed to massive amounts of the chemical. It might seem acceptable, based on that, to say there’s a chance the diacetyl in e-cigarette vapor could possibly cause popcorn lung in people who vape. But what the stalwart defenders of public health never point out is that cigarettes contain hundreds of times more diacetyl than e-cigarettes, and research finds no link between smoking and popcorn lung. Thus it is ludicrous—one might even say irresponsible—to suggest that popcorn lung is a risk faced by those who vape. But that hasn’t stopped groups like the ALA from doing exactly that."