March 31, 2020
In the middle of the COVID-19 oubreak with research -- much of it funded by the FDA through NIH -- consistently indicating that e-cigarettes depress lung's ability to fight off infection, the FDA has now petitioned the court to push the May 12, 2020 deadline for e-cigarette companies to submit their applications for approval of e-cigarettes back 4 months to September 9, 2020.
This is an outrageous misplacement of priorities. I am pleased that the health groups who secured the court order forcing the FDA to start processing e-cigarette applications are in court opposing this dangerous change.
PS: Even with no change in the court ruling, companies that get applications in by May 20, 2020 will still be able to keep selling their products for a year while FDA considers the applications.
My blog post on quitting smoking and vaping as a way to reduce COVID risk is here. I update it regularly.
March 21, 2020
This excellent investigative story by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism fleshes out the links between Public Health England and Big Tobacco.
It is long past time for people to stop paying attention to PHE and its crazy promotion of e-cigs.
The story starts:
Doctors have criticised the organisation responsible for protecting the nation’s health over its work with a vaping pressure group that is itself linked to the world’s largest multinational tobacco company.
Public Health England paid £40,000 for a series of YouTube videos co-produced by the New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) and held numerous meetings with the group, despite its ties to Philip Morris International, an investigation by the Bureau has revealed.
Read the whole thing here.
March 4, 2020
My blog posts on the federal T21 law generated a lot of questions to me about enforcement and how the federal law relates to state laws.
The FDA just posted a website that clearly addresses these issues. The bottom line in the T21 is the law everywhere in the country now with no exceptions. For people who want details, it is worth spending a few minutes looking at the FDA's commonly asked questions.
February 23, 2020
The FDA is about to close the docket on the question of whether to allow Philip Morris to make reduced risk or reduced exposure claims for IQOS. This comment updates our earlier comments with more recent information that further strengthens the case for denying both claims.
A PDF of the comment is here. The Regulations.gov tracking number is 1k4-9f6q-znav.
FDA should not authorize Philip Morris International to market IQOS with claims of reduced risk or reduced exposure
February 18, 2020
In June 2019, after peer review, the Journal of the American Heart Association published “Electronic Cigarette Use and Myocardial Infarction Among Adults in the US Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health” by Dharma Bhatta and me. Based on a cross-sectional analysis of the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) dataset, we found an association between e-cigarette use and having had a myocardial infarction (heart attack) that was independent of the effect of any current or former cigarette smoking by respondents.
One potential problem with such cross-sectional studies of the health effects of e-cigarette use is that some of the heart attacks could have occurred before e-cigarettes were available. We addressed this potential problem in the paper by conducting a subsidiary analysis limiting the data to people who had heart attacks after 2007, when e-cigarettes first became available. This additional analysis is described in the published paper: