Hard hitting vaping expose in The Times
But Joe Woof chuffed to bits that his short film The Vaping Dilemma touches on pretty much all the main issues in these articles (as did our previous white paper!) There's a paywall, so if you want a quick summary take a look at this 10 min short film here
In the piece below Kenber exposes the battle we have witnessed, which gets very heated, about whether vapes work or not to help smokers quit, and whether swap-to-stop is a dumb mistake, or a visionary policy. Also taking aim, as we have, at the '95% safer than cigarettes' stat, which is bandied about by MP's and used globally by vape companies and retailers to justify their existence. He lets ex public health minister Neil O'Brien off lightly in our view on the use of the 95% stat to justify all vaping policies.
Kenber's Saturday article exposes the links between vape and cigarette companies and deputy chair of the All Parliamentary Group on Vaping Adam Afriyie and its chair Mark Pawsey. We proposed earlier in the year this should be disbanded, and regular readers may remember Afiyie was the one who at his acceptance speech for 'most supportive parliamentarian' at the UK Vaping Awards told the tobacco companies 'you are not in the tobacco industry, you are in the healthcare industry'!! His wife has shares in a vape company. You couldn't make it up. This is right out of The Thick of It!
He also explores the targeting of the WHO for their stance which does not support the use of vapes to stop smoking. With 'Save my Vape' campaign from a pro-smoking campaigner Global Britain and and 'We Vape UK' from a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute (prev funded by cigs).
In a previous post we were shocked by how at the E-cig summit an ex ASH director Clive Bates called the WHO '“worse than the tobacco industry ever was’ because of their precautionary vaping policies and how the whole conference was bizarrely gung ho about vapes with hard challenge to us for our questions on prevention and helping vapes quit.
Here's the Saturday article.
Tobacco giants linked to attacks on WHO
We think there is a role for vapes, but the balance is wrong. Even with its policies to stop children vaping, the UK is sleepwalking into the vape company endgame, which is to create a new 'legitimate' nicotine economy for vapes like alcohol or coffee. More tomorrow!