Interesting comments on vaping

Once more, I head to my preferred UK medical journal, The Sun, (ha ha) because it runs interesting sceptical comments about vaping from UK's retiring Chief Medical Officer:

In an interview this month with Civil Service World, Professor Davies asked: “Is this a ticking time bomb? Will they turn out to have long term consequences?”

Public Health England published a report in 2015 suggesting that vaping could be 95 per cent less harmful than normal cigarettes.

The report stated: “There is no evidence that e-cigarettes (EC) are undermining the long-term decline in cigarette smoking among adults and youth, and may in fact be contributing to it."

Professor Davies conceded evidence has accumulated to suggest that e-cigarettes may help as a smoking cessation tool, but did not believe the evidence is 'hard' yet.

She added: "Meanwhile they're not regulated. So when you buy them, you don't know that you're getting what it says on the packet.

"I do - and will continue to - worry, because we don't know what the effects are of long-term use, or about the effect on people who may be upping their nicotine addiction by using them as well as smoking."

She added: “What you have to remember is that evidence is a social construct. So there’s hard evidence, from randomised control trials and meta-analysis. But then there’s other evidence.

"Policy based just on hard evidence leaves out all sorts of things that haven’t been tested but which maybe should be tried.

“The other thing, which is always difficult to explain to the public and to non-scientists, is that science kind of flip flops a bit to get to a final answer."

Not sure about that "unregulated" comment - I thought Public Health England says they are heavily regulated there? - but the Professor's comments about "science kind of flip flops a bit to get to a final answer" reminds me very much of how the views of marijuana and the risk of psychosis developed over 20 or 30 years.