This opinion piece was rejected by LE MONDE.
When scientific facts no longer reach the public
Op-Ed by Jean Moiroud
Three out of four French people are unaware that vaping is less harmful than smoking. This figure, taken from an OpinionWay poll conducted in April 2026 among a representative sample of the population, is worth noting—not for what it says about a product, but for what it reveals about a deeper dysfunction in the way scientific knowledge reaches the public.
For the paradox is striking. Never before has the evidence regarding the comparative risks of cigarettes and their nicotine-containing alternatives been so robust and well-documented. In December 2025, the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) published a collective expert report of over 700 pages, the result of three years of work, which unambiguously confirms the hierarchy of risks: smoking kills, massively and certainly; vaping is probably not risk-free, but no comparable harm has been established to date. ANSES itself expresses concern in the report: “Among the majority of the general population, the risks associated with e-cigarettes are perceived as equivalent to or more serious than those associated with smoked tobacco” and considers it “important to communicate and disseminate the conclusions of this report to the various populations.”
This recommendation was not acted upon. Better yet—or rather, worse: the report’s release in February 2026 sparked a media frenzy that had exactly the opposite effect. Inaccurate claims flooded the media and social media, with no public corrections to mitigate their impact. The April 2026 poll was conducted two months after this episode, and its results—already concerning in themselves—had deteriorated significantly compared to the previous year: they likely bear the mark of this distortion.
This observation raises a question that public health officials may too often avoid: what determines an individual’s perception of risk? Scientific facts alone are not enough: it is the way information circulates and becomes ingrained that is decisive. Research on the negativity bias makes this clear: health alerts, even unfounded ones, leave a lasting impression, while clarifications fade away. Once misinformation takes root, it resists correction. This is a well-established phenomenon in cognitive psychology.
In the field of health, this bias is amplified by the very structure of media coverage. Controversies attract an audience, while nuanced reporting does not. A headline claiming that “e-cigarettes pose risks” will be read by millions of people. The 700-page report that contextualizes and prioritizes these risks will, at best, be read by a few thousand. This asymmetry is not anyone’s fault; it is structural. But it has real, measurable, and serious consequences.
Added to this media asymmetry is another, even more troubling one: the one arising from conflicts of image. The tobacco industry provides the clearest illustration of this. When an industry with a history of documented lies positions itself in the vaping market and simultaneously makes public statements about harm reduction—a position that, in substance, aligns with scientific conclusions—the mistrust it provokes extends far beyond itself. This is the logic of contamination: the source discredits the message, and the message ultimately discredits the concept itself. The mistrust extends to the data, the institutions that produce it, and ultimately the citizens who would have needed this information to make informed decisions.
The result of this combination (cognitive biases, failures in public communication, and blurred lines) is not abstract. Four out of five French people believe that nicotine is carcinogenic. Yet nicotine is not carcinogenic: it is the combustion of tobacco that is. This confusion is not new: it is well-known and documented by the National Cancer Institute and Santé publique France. It is not trivial: it discourages people addicted to tobacco from using nicotine replacement therapies—which are reimbursed and recommended by health authorities—or from considering vaping, which these same institutions now recognize as significantly less harmful. Here, misinformation has a direct health cost, independent of any debate over this or that product.
This phenomenon raises questions about the responsibility of public health institutions—not to blame them, but to challenge them. On this point, the scientific consensus in France is strong. But its communication to the general public is clearly lacking. Institutional communication is most often designed to avoid being misunderstood—that is, to be cautious, nuanced, and conditional. These qualities ensure a report’s scientific rigor. They also make it vulnerable in terms of communication, as they compete with simplistic, peremptory, and anxiety-inducing messages.
Ultimately, the issue at stake is one of trust. A health-based democracy requires that citizens be able to make informed judgments about the risks that affect them, and that the institutions entrusted with scientific knowledge also actively promote it in the public sphere—beyond mere expert reports—where public perceptions are formed. When this space is abandoned, it is not just the facts that suffer; it is people who continue to smoke due to a lack of accurate information about the alternatives available to them.
Jean Moiroud is president of FIVAPE (the French Vaping Industry Association, an independent interprofessional trade association in the tobacco industry).