Majority of People Continue to Wrongly Blame E-Cigarettes for Vaping-Related Deaths
Remember that scary vaping-related lung disease that killed over 60 people and put another 2,700 in the hospital last year? Of course you do, how could you forget? Well it turns out people still think it was linked to nicotine-containing electronic cigarettes like JUUL, despite official source having clarified that it wasn’t.
Vaping had been continuously attacked from all sides for years, but when the disastrous EVALI epidemic struck last year, it was the final nail in the coffin. The media was quick to point the finger at brands like JUUL for putting people’s lives in danger, even though they had sold the exact same devices for years, without any major health issues from consumers. E-cigarette opponents and even organizations like the CDC or FDA kept saying that vaping was to blame so loudly that by the time test results showed the illness wasn’t related to vaping in general, but to vaping certain illegal compounds, no one cared. They thought vaping was to blame, and according to a recent poll, most of them still do.
Between January 28 – 30, survey company Morning Consult polled 2,200 adults about vaping, including who they though was to blame for the EVALI illness. 66% percent of respondents said that they viewed e-cigarettes such as JUUL as the culprit behind the lung illness. Interestingly, that percentage is 8 points higher than in September, at the height of the EVALI health crisis in the USA, and about three months before the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) confirmed that the illness could be attributed to vitamin E acetate in THC-containing vaping products.
The CDC had originally linked EVALI to vitamin E acetate in November of 2019, but a month later they officially confirmed that it was the cause of the potentially fatal lung injuries, after a study found it in almost all of the lung fluid samples from a new set of patients. The majority of the patients also had THC in their lung fluid samples, even though some had said that they had not consumed THC in the last 90 days.
By the time the true culprit behind the terrible lung illness was exposed, the public had already been indoctrinated into blaming e-cigarettes, so even now, when health officials work to inform people that marijuana vaping products containing vitamin E acetate could cause serious health problems, people still blame vaping as a whole.
“I think to some degree, it’s been intentional to conflate nicotine vaping with the THC-cannabis vaping, perhaps with the well-meaning motive about the teen panic about vaping increasing,” Dr. David Abrams, professor of social and behavioral sciences at New York University’s School of Global Public Health, said. “I think some people are thinking, ‘Let’s just demonize all vaping,’ regardless of what the science says.”
And it worked, a lot more people pin the EVALI outbreak on vaping regular nicotine-containing e-liquid (66%) than on THC vapes (28%). Once again, the media misinformation machine did its job to perfection.
To make matters worse, the same Morning Consult poll found that the majority of US adults continue to believe that e-cigarettes are harmful, despite scientific evidence showing otherwise. 65 percent of adults rated electronic cigarettes as “very harmful” in last month’s poll, 7 percent more than in September, and a whopping 27 percent more than in July 2018, when the company first asked the question.
We’ve long known that the media’s negative coverage of vaping and electronic cigarettes is heavily influencing public perception, but it appears things are getting worse every month.
Photo: kalhh/Pixabay
