Thread by @VaporAmerican

Let’s talk about Reuters reporter Chris Kirkham, one of the most slanted and one-dimensional journalists covering vaping at a major outlet (a high bar indeed).
THREAD 🧵

Reuters ran a piece by Kirkham this week that is shot through with key omissions and faulty assumptions. More on that in a second. First let’s take a look at his prior work on vaping.

Since 2018, Kirkham and Reuters have been cajoling FDA to outlaw vaping products and strip them from the market, including what he called “Juul copycats introduced…with no regulatory consequences [as part of a] campaign to subvert the world’s anti-smoking treaty.”

NB: Specialists in nicotine science and policy have been pleading with the World Health Organization to include nicotine vaping in that framework treaty Reuters alludes. Here’s a letter from more than 100 of them. Reuters has consistently ignored this.
clivebates.com/documents/WHOC…

One signatory is Dr. David Nutt, chair in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and here’s what he thinks of the WHO posture that Reuters is touting. Has Kirkham ever quoted experts like this? 🤣🤣 No.

But Kirkham’s work mirrors almost exactly the party line from hardliner prohibition groups like CTFK and PAVe. Nicotine harms the brain, he warns, hijacks neural pathways, and has a gateway effect to cocaine. Yep, you read that right:

He also relies apparently on the discredited work of Stanton Glantz, whose cardiac study was retracted in disgrace. Nicotine also had zero to do with EVALI, as Kirkham surely knows, but he never updated the record on all this bunk:

In the many vaping stories Kirkham has done since then, here’s the numbers on key sources he’s cited:
THR experts: 0
Smokers who quit w vaping: 0
Pro-vape FDA critics: 0
Research on vaping efficacy: None.

So that’s why Kirkham’s latest piece for Reuters reads like it was dictated by Meredith Berkman. FDA’s sweeping denial of 99.99 percent of the vaping market has caused grey- and black markets which means…crack down even harder.

That’s also why he allows an activist from PAVe to blame vaping for her son’s seizures – absent any skepticism or mention of the actual medical literature on that subject, like this:
jahonline.org/article/S1054-…

This is from the Journal of Adolescent Health. Do you think maybe this could have shed some light on the anecdote from PAVe that Kirkham hyped so willingly?

Here’s more from that same paper. Kirkham apparently made zero effort to seek any expert perspective on this aspect.

But we reached out to Kirkham last month when we learned of his latest reporting effort and here is some of the on-the-record input we provided, all of which he simply discarded.

That included our letter to FDA leadership warning that its PMTA process for synthetics was designed to fail. That process is the topic of Kirkham’s story but he just chucked this in the parrot cage:

We shared our citizen petition to FDA which had garnered more than four thousand comments from Americans pleading with the agency.

Kirkham just laughed at that and texted us to ridicule people who are vaping to quit cigarettes. No mention of that petition in the article, of course.

We gave him a recent study from Yale, published in JAMA, showing that flavors in vaping have a much higher efficacy in helping people quit cigarettes. Again, this is bullseye on his topic but he didn’t care, zero response.
jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…

We showed him five other studies in serious publications all along those same lines and offered to lasso contact info for the authors. Nothing, not even a cursory thanks.

We provided him an on-the-record statement from Amanda, again directly on point to the subject of his reporting. He completely blew it off.

Let’s ask Mr. Kirkham’s editors,
@VanessaOConnell
@aish_trv
@iron_emu
@AlixFreedman
Is it considered ethical journalism at Reuters to simply disregard on-the-record input your reporters request from the subjects of their stories when it doesn’t fit their preconceived notions?

Like we do with all the journalists we speak to, AVM asked Kirkham if he was concerned that the prohibition policy was driving people back to cigarettes and that the vast majority American public wrongly believes vaping is more dangerous than smoking.
His response: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯