Our Outreach to the New York Times on Its Slanted Vaping Reporting

Mar 23

Written By C

March 9, 2022

Celia W. Dugger
Health and Science Editor, New York Times

Via Email

Dear Ms. Dugger:

I am writing on behalf of my clients at American Vapor Manufacturers for explanation on errors and other serious mistakes in yesterday's piece by Christina Jewett [The Loophole That’s Fueling a Return to Teenage Vaping; 3/8/22]. Here are the specifics.

• The headline contains an error. According the CDC’s data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey, vaping among that age cohort has in fact declined more than 60 percent in the last two years. Although it may be true that some portion of that shrinking number of individuals are using synthetic nicotine products (0.81 percent at most for the product cited in the article) in no empirical or accurate sense could that be described as a “return to teenage vaping.” We would like to request a published correction.

• Ms. Jewett is also mistaken in reporting that “research is expanding into the harm caused by vaping and flavor ingredients alongside continuing cases of devastating vaping-related lung injury.” She is referring to an outbreak of what CDC calls “EVALI” that occurred in March 2019 to February 2020. But CDC, along with many other state health agencies and academic scientists, did indeed research this phenomenon and each concluded that the lung injuries were caused by illicit THC formulations containing Vitamin E acetate, a thickening agent — and found no association, zero, with nicotine vaping.

Referring to her reporting, Ms. Jewett stated to a reader on social media that “EVALI is known to occur with and without THC.” Again, this is flatly untrue and there is no scientific or medical substantiation to support her notion. Here for example is one of the NYT’s own contributors who recently detailed how this falsehood has perpetuated. It includes thorough citations and I’d urge you to read it. Here is a letter from several dozen of the academic researchers that have studied this issue, sent to CDC in August, specifying the misinformation.

Ms. Jewett’s source, Lizzie Burgess, may insist that her injury is related to nicotine vaping or perhaps that’s what she’s been encouraged to say by the nicotine prohibition activists with whom she collaborates at Parents Against Vaping. But Ms. Jewett presents no diagnostic basis for that claim despite our asking her directly — and again, that’s because there is no documentation anywhere in the whole of medical literature that nicotine vaping has caused lung injury. We request a published correction on that error also.

• I want to stress this is more than just semantics. Empirical research now shows that public misunderstanding about the actual cause of EVALI is preventing millions of cigarette smokers from quitting through nicotine vaping — a tragic outcome that the Times itself reported on just weeks ago. In other words, the Times error is fueling that public health disaster.

Similarly, Ms. Jewett allowed a different source to disparage our industry for “driving trucks of poison.” That is a horrendous and entirely false claim, not least since our industry has in fact helped many millions of smokers to quit combustible tobacco. That’s because nicotine vaping is the single most effective smoking cessation method ever devised. We would have liked the opportunity to refute the calumny the Times printed but, despite our repeated efforts to contact her, Ms. Jewett has never reached out to us.

• That’s much like the alarming quote at the end of the piece that synthetic nicotine “could alter nerve transmission in the brain in different ways from classic nicotine.” But that is pure hypothesis with no hard basis in fact. Many tobacco harm reduction authorities would say that's irresponsible and so at the very least, the reporting deserves a countervailing voice to make that clear.

• The piece is also riddled with critical omissions. Nowhere does it mention that synthetic nicotine is an entirely legal product, one that countless Americans are using to quit smoking. Or that the congressional rider’s authors receive huge contributions from tobacco companies that compete with synthetic vaping. There are zero quotes from adult smokers who have quit with synthetics, although their numbers are legion. FDA is currently defending advanced litigation in multiple federal circuits over whether it even has authority for the vaping regulations it already claims, another key fact utterly ignored. The regulations will also certainly cause nationwide business bankruptcies, job and investment loss in our industry — all disregarded in the reporting. Worst of all is the silence on how FDA’s vaping regulations have already driven millions of Americans back to smoking — a horrible regulatory dilemma that both FDA and CDC leadership have testified about to Congress.

If you could please provide us some explanation for how these errors and other flaws got past editors and also set them straight with printed corrections, we would appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Jim McCarthy
On behalf of American Vapor Manufacturers

CC:

Joseph Kahn
Managing Editor, New York Times

Cliff Levy
Deputy Managing Editor, New York Times

March 10, 2022

Joseph Kahn
Managing Editor, New York Times

Via Email

Dear Mr. Kahn,

I am following up on our email earlier this week to say I’m astonished we haven’t received even the courtesy of a reply. We pointed out several manifest factual errors, major ones that reinforce terrible public health misperceptions about smoking cessation methods, in an article for which sources were permitted to falsely accuse our companies of “driving truckloads of poison,” bent on willfully harming children — all while your reporter, Christina Jewett, rebuffed our every attempt to contact her and give on-the-record input.

In the several days since I wrote, a host of authoritative voices from the academic and scientific community on harm reduction and tobacco control have publicly criticized the reporting for the same problems we cited. Those include the former head of tobacco control for the American Cancer Society, the leading health economist in the field, a preeminent neurobiologist, a former health policy advisor to the UK prime minister, the former director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, and even a decorated health journalist who is a contributor to your own paper.

How exactly that low sort of journalism comports with the standards at the Times is perplexing. So too is your apparent indifference. Just days ago, you were described in a competing publication as a “serious and cerebral” editor, assigned to police standards at the paper in order to “crack down on excesses [and] experimentation.” I am reminded too of your publisher’s promise a few years ago that “our followers on social media and our readers come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than [an ombudsman] could ever be.” It is awfully hard to square that with your silence here.

But pleased I’m sure are the Congresspeople and their tobacco industry donors who devised the rider that will outlaw synthetic nicotine and that passed in the omnibus spending bill tonight. They cheered the article as soon as it posted and their pressure-group friends, all funded lavishly by Michael Bloomberg’s billions, celebrated it on social media. As I mentioned earlier, many of the rider’s champions are also tobacco investors, including Reps. Yarmuth, Gottheimer, Khanna, Phillips and others. If Wall Street analysts are correct in their forecasts about these prohibition measures, those gentlemen will make an enduring windfall when the market opens.

Thanks to the Times, they were able to conjure the impression of consensus and righteousness, when in reality their measure is certain — even by FDA’s own reckoning and independent studies on its existing vaping regulations — to drive huge numbers of Americans back to combustible cigarettes. The rider was in fact opposed by the more than 15 million adults in this country who rely on nicotine vaping as a highly effective means to quit smoking, not to mention the thousands of small and mid-sized businesses we represent and that are now facing ruin.

Of course all that would only matter if this legislation had been scrutinized publicly, with hearings and open debate and public comment. The Times helped trample any such impediments by providing a bandwagon so the measure could be added in, quite ironically, a smoke-filled room.

But the quality of your journalism is a distinct question from the way in which it was leveraged for this policy outcome. It’s not good enough to simply ignore good-faith, specific complaints on accuracy while at the same time crowing about your peerless standards and responsiveness to reader concerns. That’s why we will be sharing our thoughts with your readers directly and if you would care to offer any explanation for the problems in the reporting, I would still be grateful to hear it.