Thread by @VaporAmerican

After months of evading public questions while @FDATobacco’s credibility implodes around him, Brian King hand-picked Politico for his first interview. The article is behind a ($10K subscription!) paywall but let’s unpack the key parts of this travesty.
THREAD 🪡

Notice the framing: FDA’s too timid, FDA’s not doing enough, FDA coddles scofflaws. Those aspects are in hot dispute in nicotine policy world but @Katherineefoley just adopts the party line of the prohibitionists as the default.

There are independent scientists, policy experts, esteemed columnists of all stripes, and manufacturers galore who believe FDA has gone too far and on the wrong basis. Even internal FDA memos show the agency wanted a far less rigid process. That’s all disregarded.

And that’s not just theory. FDA overreach is the very basis of the litigation against the agency in multiple federal circuits and SCOTUS just rebuked EPA for the same kind of excesses. Oh and have we mentioned these policies are actively driving people back to cigarettes?

But the lede of the piece pretends the view from the crackdown caucus is the consensus of King’s “critics” – even though, again, many if not most of the stakeholders to this debate vociferously think otherwise.

Would it be worth mentioning in this part that Juul got an immediate stay from a federal court because FDA failed to read the key section of the application – and then pulled the MDO to avoid worse humiliation? Nope, to Politico it’s just inexplicable.

Are we being unfair here? Is it asking too much that a publication singularly devoted to the minutiae of inside-the-beltway dynamics might examine the demonstrable cause of the centerpiece example in its story?

Oh well, back to the “critics.” FDA could release the hounds any time dontcha know, if only they had the backbone says Politico and these two “dismayed” gentlemen.

What do Myers, Jensen, and their patrons expect to happen in their fantasy world where only a few obsolete products are approved? Will even more people go to the black market or cigarettes? Sorry, readers, Foley had no curiosity about those real world implications.

And what do these two prohibition enthusiasts have in common? That’s right, they’re both heavily bankrolled by unaccountable Bloomberg Philanthropies, a crucial fact once again concealed from readers by Politico.

Guess who else gets money via Bloomberg? Politico! That’s correct – TFK is an active sponsor of Politico’s flagship newsletter.

But that probably doesn’t affect Politico’s coverage of vaping and it must be sheer coincidence that Foley and her editor @DanCGoldberg won’t consider any stories that differ with the prohibition agenda on the issue, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But wait, this article quotes both Cliff Douglas and our own Gregory Conley, so maybe that’s an attempt at balance? Let’s have a close look.

Foley sets up the Douglas quote by asking “what’s stopping FDA from taking a firmer stance,” and has Douglas replying it’s because the agency is “mired in the weeds.”

And yet here is Douglas’s more specific view on this point, which he detailed in this published essay less than a year ago. (His hyperlink blames the TFK source she just quoted!).
medpagetoday.com/opinion/second…

In other words, Foley is well aware that Douglas believes the agency has suffered “inordinate pressure” to ban vape products and disregard science – but a reader would never know that from her copy.

Here’s how Politico frames Greg’s quote, right after King’s lament – as if AVM’s chief worry is just like the others, that FDA hasn’t banned enough.

It’s a journalism sleight-of-hand, designed to obscure the full and substantive complaints that both Greg and AVM have been consistently voicing about FDA’s reckless policies all along.

The FDA inaction that Greg *actually* described to Foley was the failure to authorize more than one percent of the vaping market, or to do nicotine education (a part of the comprehensive plan), and that the only positive is that they haven’t banned as much as Matt Myers insists.

Truncating those quotes also subtly helps Politico buttress the misleading framing of the piece – that all the critics are fundamentally of like mind about FDA’s methods on vape policy.

There’s actually a fascinating, informative, and useful piece to be written about the differences between the opposing groups faulting FDA. But this ain’t it.

Nor is there any mention of how the federal government willfully misinformed the American public over the actual cause of the EVALI outbreak – an outright deceit engineered by King himself.

That’s probably the single biggest factor that has appallingly led the vast majority of Americans to wrongly believe that vaping is more dangerous than smoking. For Politico (just like for TFK!) that’s irrelevant.

In the podcast preview for this story, Foley both misstates the complaint about King’s EVALI negligence and then sits idly while he both evades the point and brazenly lies about the current science. Topic is never even mentioned in the write-up.

Media bias on the FDA beat isn’t so much left vs. right, it’s about more vs. less. Notice how outlets like Politico always want FDA to crack down harder, expand further, get stricter, prohibit more.

There’s rarely any reflection that the regs might be doing more harm than good, no effort to include voices of ordinary people who are hurt. FDA’s limitless authority is taken as a given and they’re assumed to be good faith actors.

Just look at all these various aspects that show otherwise – all highly salient and newsworthy – ones that we’ve been pleading with Politico to cover. They could not care less.

Incredibly, King even slips in this concession – one that he ought to be shouting to the rafters instead of in a paywalled newsletter for Beltway wonks.

Naturally, there’s no follow up. As in: If you believe smokers are better off by switching to vapes then isn’t it wrong to deprive them of 99.99 percent of the products and 100 percent of the flavors they use for that life-saving purpose? 🤔

Remember last week when AVM invited stakeholder questions for Brian King? Lots of people replied with substance and insight but, yeah, nothing even remotely resembling these queries was asked by Politico.

https://twitter.com/VaporAmerican/status/1565368878749962242

So congrats on the scoop, Politico, we guess. No doubt King is waving it around the office saying, “See! Everyone says we gotta act now!” Which is the power he wanted all along of course. /