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In his fantastic talk at #GTNF2022, esteemed legal scholar @jadler1969 takes on the FDA’s many failings on vaping policy. Let’s look at some highlights. 🪡
First up, he talks about the agency’s fumbling of the PMTA process:
Adler also provides the receipts on how the FDA and CDC’s negligent messaging directly contributed to dangerous misperceptions about vaping – which started *before* the EVALI screw up:
It’s not surprising the public has been misled about the benefits of vaping. That’s because, as Adler points out, the FDA completely forbids companies from talking about how vaping is safer than combustible cigarettes.
It gets even worse. Vaping companies can’t legally repeat what FDA said at this very conference!.
“Producers of electronic cigarettes can’t quote things that Brian King said here yesterday [ . . .] that are indisputably factually true.”
Finally, Adler explains why these rules would violate the First Amendment and SCOTUS precedent:
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🔎 Let's talk for a minute about why the Supreme Court amicus brief from Sen. Dick Durbin might actually be a good thing. It's because Durbin's fanaticism and hyperbole are on such lurid display that it'll give the Court a clear sense of just who's pushing vape prohibition.
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The first thing SCOTUS law clerks will notice is the Durbin brief is strictly partisan -- all the signatories are part of Durbin's particular wing of the Democratic party. On political issues, that's fine -- but in this context it signals there's no unanimity, as Durbin pretends.
The Court will also see that Durbin is not deploying measured persuasion but instead the most hyperbolic rhetoric he can dream up.
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We need to talk about the debacle of 22nd Century's bet on low-nicotine cigarettes -- not only as an asinine business model but what the implosion says about @FDATobacco and the news media that covers nicotine policy. 1/ 🪡
Here is the company's stock chart for the last year and it's a complete wipeout. It's hard to overstate just how bad this is -- but if you invested in this company, you have basically lost your shirt.
But there was once a time, not long ago, when this stock was flying high -- selling for more than $1,200 per share with a market cap of nearly a billion dollars! What explains that? Why were investors flocking to this company?
By granting cert in the Triton case, the Supreme Court is now poised to rebuke @FDATobacco's unlawful and destructive vape regulatory scheme. But readers of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, the nation's two biggest papers, would have no idea. They didn't cover it.
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It's not like these papers don't obsess over SCOTUS / FDA. They've each got scores of stories in just the last few days, including this one on Loper fretting how the agency's "critics" (read: the American people) may confront the agency. (Shut up and eat your spinach, peasants!)
@By_CJewett even indulged Mitch Zeller whining that he can no longer rig the system for his friends. (Unmentioned: Zeller was the architect of the ban on flavored vapes that now has the agency facing an epic defenestration. Cheer up, Mitch, you're about to make history!)
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.