Well, I can, because COD:MWII has dropped a lot in usage from a few years ago. Sure, critics might claim it is an older game and new games come along and people switch to those, but if I am at FDA, none of that matters.
Which is why their bragging that they prevented 450,000 people from taking up vaping is weird. How do they know they prevented behavior that never happened? The blunt epidemiological instrument way is to do a survey and then compare how many people claim to have tried vaping and how many said they had tried it years ago and declare that your "Reefer Madness" campaign prevented all this virtual harm.
Yes, virtual harm. I don't vape because I have never smoked but Science 2.0 has been against cigarettes for all 19 of its years in existence. My kids don't vape, I don't think I even know anyone who vapes, yet I know, because data show, it is the most successful smoking cessation and harm reduction tool ever created. That it was done outside Big Pharma and Johnson & Johnson has donated a small fortune to an academic who unsurprisingly endorsed nicotine patches, which led to the group run by Professor Stan Glantz to declare vaping as harmful as actual cigarettes, was too weird for Occam's Razor to allow as coincidence.
The federal government allows an actual carcinogen to tout how much healthier it is due to being non-GMO and gluten-free but went after mom-and-pop vape stores despite no actual harm being known. Welcome to the CDC.
During the Obama years, so before the COVID-19 pandemic(1) when the American public learned the US Centers for Disease Control were incompetent and incapable of controlling anything, CDC had taken to inventing new epidemics only they could cure, like prediabetes and vaping. Suddenly, taxpayer money was being thrown around on highway billboards everywhere telling people to worry about an a1c blood number that the entire rest of the world thought was ridiculous (2) and that sketchy companies were getting kids hooked on nicotine and that was a gateway to smoking.
I am not a fan of nicotine, nor alcohol, but it was weird that the federal government tells people to use an addictive carcinogen flavored to be more pleasant than its natural form "in moderation" while saying an addictive harmless chemical flavored to be more pleasant needed bans. Yes, nicotine is addictive but it will not give you cancer the way alcohol will, and it is not toxic the way caffeine is.(3)
Yet the government acts like writing "viewing ads from “The Real Cost” lowered chances that youth who had never used an e-cigarette would later initiate use" makes any sense to anyone outside government. How do they know that young people are now less likely to vape due to government-subsidized ads? They don't, it makes NIH claims about adding $1.80 to the economy for every $1 in taxes they gather look downright rigorous.
Vaping migrated from niche smoking cessation and harm reduction, where it was twice as successful as nicotine gums and patches, to young people after government declared it a concern. Kids love to rebel and took it up as defiance. Then government doubled down and declared anyone who claimed they had tried it at all in a year was part of their epidemic.
Now it is no longer an act of rebellion, it was just an expensive pastime and the fad faded and, like fidget spinners, vaping devices sit in a drawer gathering dust. Young people know they look ridiculous doing it and stopped. If all it took to get people hooked on nicotine was using it once in 30 days, there would be millions of kids still hooked on the things.
Yet there aren't and government is declaring victory over The Epidemic That Never Was.
If you believe government stopped some vaping health disaster, I have a magic rock to sell you. You'll know it works if you don't get attacked by any tigers.
NOTES:
(1) Because these career bureaucrats had not yet gone to Congress and demanded even more money to 'combat' it, like they had with bizarre non-issues like Ebola, they told hospitals with patients that might have COVID-19 they couldn't have COVID-19 testing kits unless they first proved the patience had COVID-19. Then when the Trump administration forced them to send testing kits, they used faulty reagents, making the tests useless. Then FDA solved that problem by cutting out CDC and issuing emergency use authorizations to the private sector and suddenly everyone got testing kits.
(2) Half of China needs to go on diabetes medication if they use the CDC a1c prediabetes number. The number was promoted at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars despite their own epidemiology showing only 5% of people at that number would go on to develop diabetes in their entire lives. That means it is not clinically relevant, it is statistical noise. Academics and other Democrats can complain about DOGE taking a hatchet to funding but cutting a lot and then justifying what should come back makes sense. This garbage use of epidemiology should never come back.
(3) Someone did believe claims that nicotine was dangerous, rather than the toxic cigarette smoke in your lungs, and tried to commit suicide with it. They took 500X the LD50 dose and...nothing happened. Do that with caffeine or alcohol and you are dead for sure. That the LD50 had no relevance to humans in that case is why mouse models created by activist epidemiologists and the trial lawyers who hire them as "expert" witnesses are not trusted by the science community. Yet journalists repeat claims that PFAS in water, plastic spatulas, and weedkillers are killing us, despite there being no dead bodies to be found.
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