Congratulations to the media, politicians and Bloomberg-funded NGOs. You are winning. You bombarded the general public and especially smokers and vapers with misinformation for a decade, and now a majority of them believe vaping is equally or even more harmful than smoking. Are you proud of yourself? 

The sad reality is that probably those actors are actually proud of themselves. Whether they believe that they are serving a good cause or if it is some form of mission creep because smoking rates have been plummeting over the last decade and they are scared to lose their job, we don’t know. But here we are. In one of the most progressive countries when it comes to harm reduction, misinformation is winning.

Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) found that public understanding around vaping had plummeted in the past decade, to the point that some people have even tried to quit vaping by switching to cigarettes, as reported by The Guardian.

Ten years ago, a quarter of UK adults wrongly thought that vaping was as harmful as smoking. Today it’s 54%. That is what a decade of misinformation buys.

Even 52% of smokers, who should be most informed about their own risks, believe vaping is at least as harmful as smoking, rising to 61% among smokers who have never tried vaping. Fewer than a third get it right.

“For smokers, these misconceptions have real consequences. If someone believes vaping is as harmful as smoking, they’re less likely to use it to quit smoking and more likely to stop vaping and return to cigarettes. Both of those outcomes are far worse for their health,” Hazel Cheeseman, the chief executive of Ash, said.

So now people in the UK are starting to try quitting vaping by returning to smoking. If it were not so tragic, you would think this was straight out of a Monty Python movie. “Health” organisations, politicians concerned about public “health” and various media outlets are constantly turning sketchy research into headlines and scaremongering the public into believing this misinformation. If the UK continues this trend, we will see rising smoking rates again. Because if history taught us one thing, it is that some people like to consume nicotine. Humanity did that for thousands of years, and no government will change that fact. Not even with prohibitionist legislation like in Singapore, India or even France, the Netherlands, and Belgium with nicotine pouches. The result will be more people smoking again.

This shows that often those who shout the loudest about public health and helping people to be healthier don’t actually care about real-world results. They are so blinded by anti-nicotine ideology that they don’t mind sending people back to the most deadly form of nicotine consumption.

Even the cancer researchers themselves say so:

Alizée Froguel, prevention policy manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “There is no good evidence that vaping causes cancer. Evidence so far shows that legal vapes are far less harmful than cigarettes and other tobacco products, and they have been proven to be an effective stop smoking tool.”

So congratulations again. You convinced smokers that the thing that could save them is as deadly as the thing that’s killing them. Quite an achievement.