The irony of recycling anti-smoking propaganda is lost on vaping advocates

The World Health Organisation ‘is peddling dangerous misinformation about vaping’.

That’s according to a tobacco harm reduction campaigner, and I largely agree with him.

At the same time however he also claims that combustible tobacco ‘kills eight million people a year’.

No evidence is offered to justify that figure, nor are we given a source. We’re simply expected to accept it as fact.

So I looked it up and, amusingly, the statistic appears to have come from … the WHO!

In other words, having been told that the WHO ‘is peddling dangerous misinformation about vaping’, we are supposed to accept the same organisation’s claim that smoking combustible tobacco ‘kills eight million people a year’.

But there’s more. According to Action on Smoking and Health:

Tobacco kills up to half of its users, this equates to 8 million deaths a year globally. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.

If therefore you are minded to accept the argument that, globally, there are eight million smoking-related deaths every year, you presumably also accept that over one million deaths are the result of passive smoking.

Stuff like this is one of the reasons I find it hard to take many vaping advocates seriously, even when their motives are genuine.

The problem is that many are so invested in promoting vaping as a reduced risk option to smoking they are happy to recycle any old garbage about combustible tobacco, even when the source is the same organisation they are attacking for propagating disinformation about vaping!

The irony escapes them, it seems, which is quite funny when you think about it.

PS. I am reminded of a post, written in 2016, that featured a comment by musician Joe Jackson in response to Aaron Biebert, director of the vaping documentary A Billion Lives.

(The title of the film echoed another WHO assertion - that one billion people will die prematurely from smoking this century.)

Joe’s comments are as valid today as they were then so if you have a moment do read it: Joe Jackson on A Billion Lives.