A scandal to come?

Heh.  I see that Helen Dale, who vapes to get her nicotine hit, has re-tweeted a tweet of reassurance from Public Health England that they are not backing down from their (unusually strong) support of vaping:

No situation?   I'm not at all sure that there are any cases of young people developing life threatening lung problems within a year of smoking, are there?  


I'm sure I have commented on this before:   England's health authorities seem to have been completely persuaded unusually quickly that vaping is a pretty good thing, at least for smokers.   They don't seem to have any of the concerns of the equivalent US bodies, which have always been much more dubious.  True, there may be regulatory differences that account for some of this - such as tighter regulation in the UK of vaping liquids, and far fewer English youth getting hooked on nicotine this way.  But I still have my strong suspicions about something being not quite right about how strongly PHE has decided to endorse this nicotine delivery method.

It has a whiff of - something: perhaps money buying influence, and/or one or two key strong personalities within a health bureaucracy deciding a line and pushing it onto others.

There are hints of academic resistance - earlier this year, before the current spate of problems in the US, there was this headline in The Sun (OK, I know, not my preferred journal of health news): 

A LEADING scientist has accused health bosses of purposely "ignoring" the dangers of vaping.

Professor Martin McKee from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says that he has "serious concerns" about the safety of e-cigs.

 And a couple of doctors writing to the BMJ in 2018 expressed similar scepticism about the PHE endorsement:

We understand that such conflict, existing as it does among tobacco experts, reflects a wider uncertainty surrounding the long term health risks of e-cigarettes. That PHE, whose purpose is “to protect and improve the nation’s health,”5 should sanction e-cigarette use citing an embryonic and inconclusive evidence base, is astonishing.

There was a whole article  in an American journal looking at how the American and English appraisals of vaping could come to such different conclusions:   The E-Cigarette Debate - What Counts as Evidence.

I reckon that all it will take for the UK media to leap into strenuous criticism of the PHE approach will be one or two British youth developing the sort of serious lung issues we have seen in the US.  The tabloids, which love that sort of story, will give it plenty of coverage.

Perhaps there will then be a proper and thorough political or journalistic investigation as to how the PHE came to its conclusions, and I would not be at all surprised if there is an element of scandal to be discovered.

Let's see.  I've made my prediction:  will I be vindicated?