Serial scaremongers in the public health establishment have claimed for years that nicotine vaping can severely damage respiratory health, implausibly arguing that it may even be as harmful as cigarette smoking. It was always a spurious claim, but now the evidence supporting that assertion has gone up in smoke, courtesy of an umbrella review published in the journal Tobacco Use Insights.
No Evidence of Harm
The paper synthesized evidence from 12 systematic reviews to evaluate whether vaping poses serious risks to lung function or respiratory outcomes, revealing “no significant change in respiratory function with [vaping], either with dual use with continued cigarette use, exclusive use after quitting smoking, or naïve use by consumers who have never smoked.”
Notably, the review found no significant association between vaping and increased risks of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma worsening, or other serious respiratory conditions, directly contradicting alarmist assertions amplified by public health campaigns and news reports.
Junk data everywhere
We need to make an important qualification before drawing any conclusions, however. Many of the previous reviews were based on very poor evidence. For example, one review “combined cross-sectional and longitudinal studies … which limits the ability to establish causal relationships,” the authors wrote of a study they excluded from their analysis.
Cross-sectional studies take a single snapshot in time, while longitudinal studies follow people for an extended period to draw associations between a health outcome and an exposure, vaping in this case. Putting the results of these divergent studies in the same category actually makes it harder to assess the effects of long-term vaping by distorting the data we have access to.
An equally serious problem was that many previous studies failed to account for duration and intensity of vaping and smoking, rendering their results all but useless. If you don’t know how many cigarettes somebody smokes and how long they’ve smoked, then you can’t assess their respiratory health with any confidence.
It can’t be understated how important these conclusions are, because they expose the truly awful science behind the campaign against nicotine vaping. We know from previous well-designed research that switching from combustible cigarettes to vaping drastically reduces the disease risk an individual faces. The fact that these lower-quality studies didn’t detect the same improvements probably means “the smoking history of the participants [is] masking potential changes in test results,” the reviewers added.
Conclusion
The umbrella review strikes a serious blow against the politicized narrative that equates vaping and smoking. The only possible conclusions to draw from this review are as follows: vaping has no impact on respiratory health, which is unlikely; or, more plausibly, the reviewed studies are dreadful and we need better data as soon as possible.
“For accuracy,” the reviewers concluded, “future studies must conduct their analyses on the specific patterns and frequency of [vaping].” They were more polite than I would have been, but the point remains: most anti-vaping research is warmed-over garbage. We should treat it as such.
