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Pretty startling example today of the outlandish double standard in how the Wall Street Journal @WSJ and the national press treat liquor companies compared to vape companies. Let’s take a close look.
THREAD 🧵
This is a straight up puff piece, not a word of critique or skepticism. All the dial-a-quote consumer activists who hate liquor – and these are mostly the same people who vilify vaping in the national press – are absent here.
Same with the brickbats the Journal and others use to bash vaping. Comes in kid-friendly flavors! Marketed to youth! Bright colors, easy access! All of that is turned on its head into virtues and praise for this story.
Key takeaways in the piece – adults like flavors, adults like variety, adults want to make choices about their own health, innovation and streamlining market access are smart ideas. Ever seen a story in a national paper on vaping like that? 🤔
Compare that to how this same reporter, @maloneyfiles, covers vape manufacturing. Here, the good ol’ FDA has to crack down to protect the kids from those diabolical flavors, dontcha know.
Notice how these stories are always framed as if the vape companies are rogue actors, skirting the law and predating on the kids. Who rides to the rescue? The government and the press, yeehaw!
But wait a second, all during this time that the Journal was fawningly reporting on FDA’s crackdown, the agency itself knew internally that adults prefer flavored vaping and use it to quit smoking with far higher efficacy than tobacco flavor and any NRT.
Let’s reiterate – flavors not merely to gain market share but to help save the lives of American adults from combustible cigarettes with an efficacy higher than any cessation method ever devised.
Documents we uncovered prove the regulations were based on deceit and that the leadership quashed scientific findings from FDA’s own experts.
Guess how many calls and emails we got from the Journal’s FDA beat writer, Ms. Maloney requesting the source document or a follow up quote from us? That would be zero. Must have been busy with the White Claw exclusive.
Even more strange, the same aspects for which the Journal and other press denounce vaping are ones that didn’t bother Ms. Maloney about White Claw at all. Mango vape = bad. Mango White Claw = ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Or White Claw’s mega-bucks national ad campaign, plainly aimed at a young demographic. No problem – in fact probably good for sales!
But don’t underage consumers obtain alcohol beverages at far higher rates than vape devices, resulting in countless injuries and death that are entirely absent from the vaping market? Hey, ain’t no laws when ya drinking Claw!
Here's the key stats, all entirely unmentioned in the WSJ's bouquet piece on White Claw. These are vastly worse than vaping in every respect -- but you'd never know that from the Journal's slanted coverage.
White Claw pushed viral memes, tiktoks, hashtags and more – even showing a baby being baptized in “the name of the father, son, and the holy white claw.” Actual tag line! cnbc.com/2021/04/01/whi…
Are you absolutely kidding me?
Can you imagine if a vape company did that? They’d be gibbeted on the FDA lawn and the Journal would get the exclusive photo op.
Here’s the most galling aspect of all. White Claw is not saving lives or “benefiting the public health” as the mantra goes. But there are in fact millions of Americans that rely on vaping *TO QUIT CIGARETTES*, the number one cause of preventable death!
Instead of examining that crucial public health reality, the Journal is focused instead on who’s gonna win the battle of flavored vodka market share. It’s hypocritical and it is truly shameful.
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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.