There’s something kinda weird at Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids we ought to talk about. It starts w how CTFK president Matt Myers got trounced in a dialogue on national tv this week. 🧵THREAD
On a show called “The Doctors,” an actual physician, Dr. Michael Siegel of Tufts Univ., took Myers to the woodshed for deceiving the American public. But get this: CTFK is *promoting* the segment on its social media!
Here’s the really weird part — none of CTFK’s 26K followers on Twitter are sticking up for Myers or CTFK. The only comments are from people adding more rebuttals to CTFK’s bunk!
This is a constant pattern for CTFK. There are virtually no actual people voicing support for this so-called leader in prohibition activism. Example: this tweet hypes a big fundraiser and no 👏 one 👏 cares 👏. ZERO ENGAGEMENT!
Same on Facebook, where CTFK supposedly has 64K followers. Here’s the big announcement and the response is just…crickets.
For comparison, here’s a twitter account with a similar size following. It posts nothing but panda photos and yet this account gets far more engagement than CTFK.
It’s not like CTFK doesn’t have enough resources. There’s eight pros on the PR/digital team alone and the top guy makes $200K/year! Plus they spend millions each year on high-powered communications agencies.
And for as much as CTFK loves to complain about "evil billionaires" and “front groups,” they sure do cozy up to a lot of billionaires and act like a front group themselves.
Look closely and CTFK has all the hallmarks of what Beltway political pros call “astroturf.” They stage fake events like this one and posture like iT’s aLL aBoUt tHe kIDs. But really, it’s just grownups raking in the cash for their own agenda.
Does CTFK’s Board of Directors care that its high-paid social media team can’t even compete with photos of pandas and other bot accounts? Hell no. That’s not the point of CTFK.
Tons of their social media energy is devoted to heaping praise on fellow prohibitionists like the loathsome head of WHO and egomaniac Michael Bloomberg.
And that’s the real mission of CTFK — to act as a fake grassroots group that public officials can point to as justification for stripping adult Americans of the right to switch from cigarettes to vaping. It is political grifting, plain and simple. END
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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!
Deceptive headline, half-truths and a whole lot of scaremongering. @USATODAY's @Mary_Walrath just wrote maybe the most irresponsible anti-vaping story we've ever seen. Let's do the fact-checking her editors should have done before publishing this train wreck. THREAD 🧵
Reporting on a study from @EmoryRollins, Walrath's piece veered off the rails immediately with the headline. There isn't a shred of evidence (in the article, the study or anywhere else) to support the claim that vapor poses a risk "like secondhand smoke."
We invite USA Today and Emory to prove us wrong. They won't, because there is no evidence causally linking nicotine vapor to *any* disease. Walrath buried this critical fact in the 9th (!) paragraph of her story.
🔎 This is horrendous. In a forum at @SMPAGWU yesterday (on misinformation!) @DrCaliff_FDA once again misleads Americans with the false notion that vaping is just as dangerous as smoking — thus deterring people from switching to a vastly safer alternative. 1/
Here's the verbatim remarks. Notice the false equivalence and the bunk gateway theory and how he lumps vaping in with lethal diseases -- even though vaping has injured or killed precisely no one and in fact saves lives.
Oh, more proactive you say? So far as we can tell, you haven’t lifted a finger to set the public record straight on what your own @FDAtobacco director says are widespread misperceptions about vaping.
🧐 Can we just talk for a second about the crayola math that @FDATobacco is using to rationalize its attack on open-system vape products? As @Vaping360 reports, the agency showcased an erroneous figure in its own press release.
1/🪡
And as our @GregTHR notes, the 2023 National Youth Tobacco Survey reported that 7.7 percent of middle and high school students had used an e-cig in the prior 30 days. AMONG THOSE respondents, 11.3 percent said they used a Smok product — which is 0.87 percent of total respondents.
The total number of students that completed this survey was 22,069. By simple calculation, that means that *176 total students* in the nationwide survey said they had used a Smok product in the prior 30 days. That’s the figure FDA is citing to outlaw this entire product line.
Blistering ruling against @FDATobacco just dropped in the 5th circuit vape case. Here's our statement, along with analysis.
THREAD 🪡
Here is a link to the full ruling, which is chock-full of hard-hitting language that rebukes FDA's methods, duplicity, and the horrendous outcomes it has caused. theavm.org/s/bb9i.pdf
🔎 👀
Here's a crucial piece just posted in the prestigious Chronicle of @Philanthropy by renowned journalist @MarcGunther. It examines the blinkered intransigence that is blocking progress on tobacco harm reduction. Let's dive in.
THREAD 🧵
The piece centers on Cliff Douglas @cdoug, a conscientious voice in this debate who has tried mightily to foster an open and principled discourse on the most effective ways to help people quit smoking.
But even someone with career-long, impeccable credentials in tobacco control is up against powerful forces that won't tolerate or engage with any viewpoint outside their cloistered bubble.