Thread by @VaporAmerican

It’s literally incredible. The world’s leading public health authority, @WHO, is now getting regularly lit up by @CommunityNotes for brazen and calculated deceits about nicotine vaping. Let’s take a close look.
THREAD 🪡

There is a widely-held scientific consensus that vaping is vastly less harmful than smoking. Yet with zero supporting evidence, WHO flatly insists the opposite, with the clear intent to dissuade the public.

Not only is WHO's claim wrong—they themselves have said it's wrong. Among the more than 100 scholarly sources cited in this community, two are from the World Health Organization itself!

"The use of e-cigarettes is expected to have a lower risk of disease and death than tobacco smoking," declares the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

The very same day, April 8, WHO ran into another Community Notes buzz-saw with the outlandish claim that vaping causes seizures.

But here is what the @WHO concealed from the public:

Leading tobacco science expert Dr. Neal Benowitz wrote the first article listed in the Community Note. He included several other crucial details about those seizure cases WHO left out:
jahonline.org/article/S1054-…

Now, you might think that @WHO's leadership would try to preserve its dwindling credibility in the face of such withering criticism. But nope, the people running this campaign are actually thrilled with their work and utterly disinterested in the facts right below their posts.

Here is behavioral scientist and @WHO consultant @drsimonwilliams celebrating his own efforts on the seizure post the same day the Community Note went up.

Even more telling: here is @WHO's Head of Social Media & Media Monitoring, @Diya_iamdb, who also concocted this deceitful campaign and boosted the same post with the Community Note in plain sight.

She's not some random staffer, @diya_iamdb is a senior official who gives lectures to global health communicators on how to fight misinformation.

WHO didn't launch its anti-vaping crusade just this month. In January, they repeated this classic trope:

Community Notes didn't have to venture far for a rebuttal. Even @CDCgov, itself a major source of anti-vaping agitprop, knows the "tobacco toxins" gambit is baseless.

Why? Because there are far *fewer* chemicals in nicotine vapor than tobacco smoke. If users are exposed to less of a harmful substance, then basic logic dictates their risk of harm is also lower.
cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_…

The aim here is both obvious and irresponsible -- to blur and conflate all understanding of what specialists in this field call the "continuum of risk" and thereby deter people from switching to a vastly safer alternative.

...same Community Notes rebuttal.

Not content with simply posting one specious claim at a time, that same week WHO tweeted out five deceptions in one fell swoop.

Again, Community Notes was having none of it.

Inevitably, WHO had to amplify the "gateway" effect, a popular but factually bankrupt allegation that vaping encourages smoking.

Turns out, "Substantial research suggests the opposite..." that vaping is a "gateway" OUT of smoking.

Unfortunately, many health authorities have followed WHO's lead. Here's Northern Ireland's Public Health Agency using scare tactics to push the same unsubstantiated "gateway" claim.

Echoing its response to WHO, Community Notes dropped a mountain of studies in the comments—all showing a diversion effect: smokers use vaping to avoid cigarettes.

No retraction, no apology. Instead, Public Health Agency re-upped the same lie with a copycat graphic two weeks later.

We're not sure how else to say this, @publichealthni: you are inverting the truth and encouraging millions of people to smoke. This has to stop.

Canada's Lung Health Foundation is also deeply concerned about youth vaping. 750K is a big number, after all.

It's also a deliberately inflated figure. What happens when you don't count 30-year-olds as teenagers?

In our most ironic example, here's Informed Consent Matters badly misinforming its thousands of followers, alleging that vaping is "worse than smoking"!

Kate Pickles @kate_pickles, "health editor" at @MailOnline, should also see this Community Note. No credible study shows that vaping causes harm "just like smoking."

Here's Franciscan Health, a 12-hospital health care system serving two states, lamenting the "rising trend" of youth vaping.

But teen vaping hit a record low late last year, @MyFranciscan.

Of course, you should have known that because @CDCgov and @US_FDA released their latest youth vaping data a month before you posted this dishonest tweet.

Here's @ParentsvsVape pushing the long-refuted smear that nicotine vaping causes the lung injury known as EVALI. Every expert who has examined the data knows this isn't true.

And most shameless for last, here's Harvard Medical School's @HarvardHealth botched take on "popcorn lung," which absolutely is *not* caused by nicotine vaping.

As Community Notes correctly explained, the offending chemical isn't even used in nicotine e-liquid.

Here's a thread we did taking Harvard to task for its long history of maligning vaping with zero justification.

Every major public health organization warns about the dangers of "misinformation." @WHO rightly says that false info distorts public perceptions and "can delay the provision of health care." Yet WHO itself continues to lie about vaping, jeopardizing the health of millions.

We're grateful to @CommunityNotes for holding these powerful orgs accountable. But where is the fire brigade of journalists, fact-checkers and assorted "misinformation" experts in all this?

The World Health Organization trashes the scientific consensus and pathologically lies about a tool that could save millions of lives. That should be front-page news, yet what do the self-appointed guardians of truth in the press have to say? Nothing. /