GTNF 2022 Remarks – Amanda Wheeler

My name is Amanda Wheeler and I’m with American Vapor Manufacturers. On behalf of our group of dedicated vaping businesses and the customers we serve, I’d like to speak with you about where our common battle to take charge of our own health destinies is headed. 

Last month in the New York Times, buried deep in an article on FDA’s increasingly merciless war on adult nicotine users, was a line of factual reporting that signaled something truly groundbreaking. “There is mounting consensus,” the Times reported, “that nicotine vaping products are useful for helping adult smokers quit.”

That’s hugely important because for the first time, the nation’s leading news outlet candidly conceded what has been plainly obvious to most everybody at this conference for many years.  Remember, we are talking about a newspaper that has relentlessly demonized vaping, applauded the most rabid prohibitionists, and urged the government to crack down harder, tax higher, and outlaw faster the products that millions of Americans rely on to break free of cigarettes.

In journalism that’s called a “rowback” – when a newspaper attempts to correct its previous reporting without indicating the prior coverage had been in error or without taking responsibility for the mistakes. 

Reading that startling admission reminded of the scene in the Lord of the Rings movies when the townsfolk look up at the menacing dragon flying above and realize that it has a missing scale in the middle of its breast. 

That’s because with each passing day the great, deceitful charade that is the nicotine prohibition campaign becomes more fatally flawed. Its widespread harms to ordinary Americans become harder to ignore, the financial corruption that sustains it becomes tougher to conceal. And the righteous anger among the millions of Americans who are being stripped of their livelihoods and their fundamental right to switch from cigarettes to vaping becomes impossible to contain. 

We are not going back, you can’t buy us off, and we will not sit quietly as self-aggrandizing billionaires like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg try to hijack public health policy.  And if the news media can’t summon the integrity to dutifully examine how these policies got so absurdly warped, then we will do their jobs for them. 

A few days ago, AVM published a report that maps out in detail all of the spending by the prohibition paymasters including Gates, Bloomberg, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation over the last five years. The sums are staggering and well into the hundreds of millions of dollars – and it reveals a concerted scheme to capture and control leading public health organizations like American Heart and Lung associations and the Cancer Society. 

When those funders realized their plans were totally at odds with harm reduction principles, they simply bought off the largest harm reduction group in the country, Vital Strategies, with tens of millions to purchase their silence and complicity.  To ensure a steady stream of obedient journalism, they manipulated news outlets with nationwide PR campaigns, big advertising spends, and even direct payments to news outlets like STAT News and Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Heedless of the fragile state of trust in public health institutions, Gates and Bloomberg funneled payoffs to leading research universities to produce half-baked bunk that tries to connect vaping to everything from depression to acne to brain damage, high blood pressure, genetic mutations, brain fog, poor eyesight, pre-diabetes, increased Covid risk and, I am not kidding, erectile dysfunction. This is the hyperbolized and dirty kerosene that has flamed one of the most irresponsible moral panics of our time.

But notice what happens when truly independent, uncorrupted journalists take a close look at this issue.  I’m talking about writers whose beat doesn’t depend on currying favor from federal agencies or whose paycheck isn’t subsidized by parties to this issue or who don’t care about clickbait and are unafraid to offend the groupthink sensibilities of the Beltway media.

One of those is decorated writer Marc Gunther whose blistering pieces in Filter and Chronicle of Philanthropy laid bare a culture of unaccountable hypocrisy and hubris at Truth Initiative and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Another is the head of MIT’s program in science journalism, Seth Mnookin, whose scorching longform article last month in the Boston Globe exposed FDA’s misguided approach on vaping and the blinkered intransigence of the American Heart Association. There’s also the legendary John Tierney, who spent 20-plus years as a science writer at the New York Times. Or syndicated columnist Veronique de Rugy. Or veteran columnist at the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins. Or author Michael Moynihan writing in the influential journal Common Sense. Or esteemed constitutional law professor Jonathan Adler, who has dissected FDA’s flimsy legal justifications. One after another all this summer they each took sledgehammers to the narrative on vaping that we read routinely in the prestige media.

Author Noah Rothman, editor of the theology magazine called Commentary, just published a top-selling book that singles out the anti-vaping zealots as part of what he calls “the rise of the new puritans.”

“American society's response to the popularization of vaping has all the markings of a moral panic,” Rothman wrote. “It's a reflection of our inherited puritan capacity for anxious introspection. The concerns that inspired this absurd overreaction would be familiar to the Puritans who witnessed the witch trials with some trepidation, even if they believed that devilry was an omnipresent force. Evil's insidiousness is a particularly powerful influence over the young and indolent, and keeping an eye out for its temptations is a task without end. This is nothing less than a collective mania and we flatter ourselves today when we assume that our society has advanced beyond such superstitious pursuits. We most certainly have not.”

Let me stress, these writers are not only at the very top of their field but they span the entire ideological spectrum and come from a wide range of intellectual disciplines.  All of them and many more are now sounding the alarm that the path being taken by FDA is built on dishonesty, irrationality, and is causing grave and active harm to the health of countless people.

You would be correct to wonder, isn’t that what Americans count on the working press for?  Aren’t journalists constantly reminding us that they are watchdogs on the powerful, that they’ll stand up to entrenched authority, expose corruption without fear or favor?  

Yet here we have two of the wealthiest men in this country depriving millions of our fellow citizens of a fundamental right that is backed up by the broad consensus of scientific analysis. They have paid off congressmen, strong-armed federal agencies, rigged academic research, sprayed cash at journalists, used front groups to lie to the public with ghastly regularity and told every independent scientist who pleaded with them for moderation to jump in a lake – all without ever facing so much as a single tough question from a major outlet.

Notice too that their paid minions evade that scrutiny also. Matt Myers at TFK rarely faces any challenging questions and the press is happy to conceal his funding when they quote him. Neither does Meredith Berkman from the Potemkin parents group.

The financial records in our report on their massive funding was in public databases – yet not a single reporter on the very beat that covers this issue ever lifted a finger to uncover it and they ignored countless appeals from us to do that legwork. 

Or consider the new head of FDA’s tobacco office, Brian King, who evaded all public inquiry for months into his tenure with zero public complaint from the press corps. During his lengthy confirmation hearings, Robert Califf endured no questions whatsoever on vaping policy from the many reporters that covered the proceedings. We have offered frequent vaping critic and former Surgeon General Jerome Adams an open, written dialogue on vaping policy for more than six month and gotten only silence.  CDC’s Rachelle Walensky last month told the press that her new top priority is public accountability and yet she and that agency continue to brazenly mislead the public on the true nature of the EVALI outbreak – again, with not an ounce of skepticism from the reporters who transcribed that claptrap.

By the media and the federal government’s own lights, the result has been shameful. More than 80 percent of the public now wrongly and falsely believe that vaping is somehow more dangerous than smoking – and that figure has gotten steadily worse in each of the last four years.  Yet both those institutions – the press and the federal health authorities – insist that their top mission is to diligently and accurately inform the public.  In that core duty to which all of us have invested so much trust, they are failing. Let me say it again – failing, to their immense disgrace. 

So as the credibility of the prohibition mania begins to implode and the arrows seek the dragon’s underbelly, I for one don’t want to hear any of those participants claiming they didn’t know or weren’t aware or were just trying to do their darnedest to help the folks.

They knew then and they know now.  They’ve heard it from me and from nearly everyone at this conference for years. The truth is that most of the press covering this issue and the federal agencies too have nothing but contempt for vapers. 

At a recent journalism conference, Robert Califf openly mocked the vapers pleading with him on social media, calling them “TWITTERATI” and then laughing “what are they gonna do to me, I’m impervious to critique!” Incredibly, the journalists in the audience applauded.  The proof of the media’s antipathy for vapers is the fact that in the last three years no major news outlet – not the New York Times or Politico or the AP or the Washington Post or NBC News – none of them have quoted even a single person who has quit smoking with vaping.

Think about that for a moment.  I’m talking about millions of our fellow Americans, trying mightily to quit smoking. That is supposed to be the centerpiece concern of this entire public health discussion, the very heart of the matter. And yet the press and the government treat them as irrelevant and useless, people who deserve only ridicule at best. 

So for any journalists that want to correct course, pull back on the stick, and start covering this issue with integrity, the time to start is now.  You will be in good company with the many esteemed thinkers I cited and you will be keeping faith with the public you have promised to serve with objectivity and accuracy. 

We would urge others in the public health community to follow suit. Just in recent weeks, senior officials at places including FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products and Truth Initiative have resigned and left, apparently for reasons of conscience.  They join many others who departed tobacco control institutions that have lost their moral bearings or put their principles up for sale.

Let’s hear no excuses and no pretense that the moral choices in this vital public health policy were somehow unclear. We are way past that point now. Instead let’s join together for the cause of tobacco harm reduction – one that puts ordinary, individual Americans first.

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