Brazil’s vape ban created chaos, and its own press is blaming vaping instead of the ban. Media outlets spent the last few weeks correlating vapes with diabetes, cancer, poisoned toddlers, and the honest read of the evidence points somewhere else entirely: at the ban itself.

Open a Brazilian news site this month, and you’ll find e-cigarettes blamed for pre-diabetes, oral cancer and collapsed lungs. Many scares, one recurring move: take a study with real limitations, strip out the caveats, and run the scariest possible headline. Brazil has banned the sale of vapes since 2009, and instead of asking whether that policy is working, its press keeps recycling myths that make the ban look justified when the evidence says the opposite. Coincidence, or manipulation?

A Weak Correlation Gets Sold as a New Health Danger

Bossa News reported on a University of Georgia study in AJPM Focus linking e-cigarette use to a 7% increase in pre-diabetes risk, against 15% for traditional cigarettes and 28% for people who use both. What the coverage left out are the normal caveats of an observational study like this one: no discussion of sample composition, no acknowledgment of confounding variables, no acknowledgment that a population that already smokes, drinks, and eats differently than non-users will produce correlations that aren’t the same as vaping causing the risk. Independent reviews from Public Health England, the UK’s Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, and Cochrane have consistently found vaping around 95% less harmful than smoking, a gap this coverage never mentions while treating a weaker association as proof of equivalent danger.

Warning of a Future Cancer Wave While Admitting None Has Arrived Isn’t Science

Guarulhos em Destaque cited a 2023 review of 22 studies on DNA damage in oral cells exposed to vapor, as well as a 2025 USP Institute study finding that some vape users’ saliva carried nicotine concentrations equivalent to about 20 cigarettes a day. Then the article undercuts its own headline: it admits there has been no significant rise in actual oral cancer cases in Brazil despite years of rising vape use, and explains that away as a lag between exposure and clinical outcome. There is just one small (or rather, huge) problem with all this: the studies were conducted in a Petri dish. It is widely acknowledged within the scientific community that studying cancer cells in Petri dishes has many issues and presents significant challenges, such as microbial contamination (by bacteria, fungi, or invisible mycoplasmas), accidental cross-contamination between cell lines, and a loss of biological relevance, since a simple two-dimensional environment fails to replicate the three-dimensional complexity of an actual tumor in the human body.

That’s a (very weak) hypothesis dressed up as a warning. A headline promising a “future increase” in cancer, built on lab data and an absence of any actual increase, is doing the reader’s thinking for them in the wrong direction, and it’s the same playbook.

Vapes at Drug Busts Are Evidence the Ban Failed

Two recent police stories complete the picture. In Rio Verde, officers raided a shop and found a pistol, live .38 ammunition, several phones of dubious origin, and a high number of vape units. On BR-153, a famous read, an integrated police operation seized 755 kilograms of illegal marijuana alongside 110 vapes in a single bust. These stories build an implicit gateway argument: vapes turn up where drugs and weapons turn up, so the people selling vapes must belong to the same networks running drugs and guns. WVA’s own submission to ANVISA on this exact ban makes the actual mechanism plain: an estimated 4 million Brazilians already get vaping products through the informal market the ban created, with none of the quality or safety guarantees regulation would provide, and that same illegal channel is what allows criminal organizations to profit and gives minors easier access than a regulated retail market ever would. Vapes showing up next to marijuana and stolen phones is what happens when a government hands an entire product category to the only supply chain still willing to move it.

Misinformation Has a Body Count

None of this is a neutral disagreement about how to read a study. WVA’s Resource Center shows Sweden’s smoking rate sits at 5.3% and the UK’s at 10.6%, both countries that leaned into vaping as a harm reduction tool, against an EU average of 24% among countries that didn’t. The gap tracks the policy choice. Brazil’s ANVISA is currently considering tightening its ban further, which would criminalize the same 4 million people it has spent sixteen years failing to keep away from vaping, and every one of the myths above is doing the work of making that tightening look reasonable. A smoker who reads that vapes cause diabetes, cancer, and lung damage on top of funding cartels has no reason to switch. WVA has laid out, submission after submission, in Brazil and everywhere else this fight is happening, that regulation beats prohibition on every outcome that matters, and a press corps that keeps recycling debunked scares instead of reporting that case is doing the ban’s public relations work for it, one headline at a time.