CASAA Call to Action: In what I can only describe as a desperate attempt to obliterate Vaping, CDC Director Tom Frieden has joined the top 5 desk killers in the ANTZ movement. The tactic is always the same, treat Vaping the same as smoking cigarettes. Throw millions of our tax dollars at a media Campaign which includes an ecig segment. How clever! NOT. Vaping is not the same as smoking a cigarette since the combustion/burning of tobacco does not occur while you vape and ejuice does not contain around 4K dangerous chemicals like tobacco does. Just a few things Desk Killer Frieden said:
The use of e-cigarettes among teenagers has eclipsed the use of traditional cigarettes and all other tobacco products, a development that Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called “alarming” and “shocking.”
“What’s most surprising is how incredibly rapid the use of products other than cigarettes has increased,” Frieden said in an interview, adding that some e-cigarette smokers would undoubtedly go on to use traditional cigarettes. “It is subjecting another generation of our children to an addictive substance.”
“I’ve treated so many adults who are desperate — desperate — to get off tobacco. They all started as kids,” Frieden said. “I see the industry getting another generation of our kids addicted. To me, as a physician, when 1.78 million of our high school kids have tried an e-cigarette and a lot of them are using them regularly … that’s like watching someone harm hundreds of thousands of children.”
In addition, he said, “people have a misconception that the tobacco epidemic is a thing of the past. Tobacco still kills more Americans than any other cause. It still kills more than 1,000 people a day. As a doctor, I can tell you it kills them in really unpleasant ways — gasping for breath with emphysema, with cancer, with heart disease.”
What does that have to do with e-cigarettes?
“E-cigarettes are a tobacco product,” he said.
Of course this is not the entire story and represent numerous lies:
To the contrary, vaping and smoking rates among teenagers are moving in opposite directions. Less noticed was a fact relegated to the fourth paragraph: “Cigarette use declined among high school students and remained unchanged for middle school students.” Among high school students, 9.2 percent reported past-month cigarette use in 2014, down from 12.7 percent in 2013. Among middle school students, 2.5 percent reported past-month cigarette use, down from 2.9 percent in 2013. The latter drop was not statistically significant, which is why the CDC says the rate “remained unchanged.”
The divergence between vaping and smoking is even more dramatic when you look at the period from 2011 through 2014, when the rate of past-month e-cigarette use rose from 1.5 percent to 13.4 percent among high school students and from 0.6 percent to 3.9 percent among middle school students. Meanwhile, past-month cigarette smoking fell from 15.8 percent to 9.2 percent in the older group and from 4.3 percent to 2.5 percent in the younger group. Needless to say, this is not what you would expect to see if vaping encouraged smoking.
How hard is this to understand for a person who actually embraces public health. Smoking rates are declining in our youth. Period. No credible evidence exists that vaping by our youth is a gateway to smoking. The numbers by the CDC support this fact. Yet CDC Director Tom Frieden ignores these facts in his own report and joins the top 5 Desk Killers in the world.
Sources:
Why Is The CDC Lying About E-Cigarettes?
CDC director explains what he hates about electronic cigarettes