The annual survey conducted by OpinionWay for FIVAPE reveals a very concerning shift in how people perceive the risks associated with vaping versus smoking, particularly among young adults.
The 8th edition of the annual survey on the French public’s perception of the risks associated with smoking versus vaping once again reveals a profound lack of understanding of scientifically established facts recognized by health agencies. In France, the issue of vaping is being mishandled, leaving the general public caught between a lack of information, analyses divorced from context, and misconceptions.
For FIVAPE and its members, who have been successfully helping millions of smokers quit for the past 15 years, the systematic denigration of vaping has become unbearable. Through this press release, the French vaping industry wishes to denounce a situation that is completely unjust and incomprehensible given the service it provides to public health: 3 million French people have quit smoking through vaping.
This important survey aims to highlight the unprecedented extent of this disconnect between perception and reality. But despite a month of sustained efforts and follow-ups with the media, not a single news outlet was willing to cover it!
Op-ed rejected by LE MONDE
Le Monde, for example, suggested that we write an op-ed instead. We complied, following the guidelines and adopting the “broad perspective” requested by the editorial staff in order to offer a measured introduction to this public health issue.
Here is an op-ed written by Jean Moiroud, president of FIVAPE: When Scientific Facts Fail to Reach the Public.
Without explanation, this op-ed was rejected.
We then pitched it to other media outlets, where it was consistently turned down.
Paid newspaper ad rejected by LIBÉRATION
By the end of 2025, the daily newspaper Libération had repeatedly welcomed announcements from FIVAPE, which were published under the heading “political communication.”
We reached out to the advertising agency to see if we could run another ad, this time about the survey results. They gave us the green light, provided that our ad remained strictly “political” and was not “advertising” for vaping.
Here is the ad we proposed, based exclusively on verifiable, cited scientific facts: More than one in two French people believe that vaping is no less risky than smoking.
This ad was rejected due to legal pressure from the CNCT on the newspaper. If you would like more information, please contact Libération directly.
Total silence surrounding the poll
As a result, this year, FIVAPE’s annual survey on the French public’s perception of the risks associated with vaping and nicotine will not be covered by the media.
However, the trends in this 8th edition are cause for concern in more ways than one:
- Over the past year, the proportion of people who believe that vaping is no less dangerous than smoking has increased by 5 percentage points. In fact, 58% of respondents believe that vaping does not reduce the risks associated with smoking, compared to 53% in 2025;
- 15% even believe that vaping is more dangerous than smoking: this is a record high since the first version of this survey 10 years ago;
- According to the detailed results provided by OpinionWay, 33% of 18- to 24-year-olds believe that vaping is riskier than smoking, a more than 50% increase compared to 2025! We believe this result is the outcome of the anti-vaping and anti-nicotine campaign conducted over the past 18 months by Contre Feu, the CNCT, and DNF, which specifically targets young people via social media with the support of numerous paid influencers;
- The demonization of nicotine continues to lead 4 out of 5 French people (80%) to believe that it is carcinogenic. The nicotine used in vaping is the same as that found in reimbursed nicotine replacement therapies, and it is not carcinogenic. It is the smoke that kills, not the nicotine…
Public communication about vaping, nicotine, and harm reduction is lacking. Meanwhile, smokers continue to die from their addiction to tobacco.
You can view the full analysis and results of the OpinionWay survey here: French public opinion on smoking and vaping.
Misinformation: Where do you come from?
The reasons behind this lack of awareness regarding established scientific facts about vaping naturally raise questions.
For several years now, a project called “Génération Sans Tabac”—a website managed by the CNCT and funded by the addiction prevention fund—has been regularly criticized by the vaping industry, as well as by consumers, grassroots organizations, and many healthcare professionals, for its editorial stance, which is highly critical of harm reduction tools and vaping in particular.
To ensure this, FIVAPE has decided to conduct a comprehensive audit of all the content on the website. This monumental task—involving the analysis of over 2,300 published articles—would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. But today, advances in AI have made it possible, with a particularly high degree of precision.
This audit resulted in a report that breaks everything down: the tone of headlines and content (not a single positive article about vaping out of 2,347 publications!), whether or not major scientific studies were covered, funding, and so on.
It can be viewed here: Analysis of the media coverage of vaping by Génération Sans Tabac
Through this research, FIVAPE observes and confirms that misinformation about vaping not only persists but is actually on the rise. And now, this is compounded by an increasingly open culture of silence surrounding this “manufacture of doubt.”
Vaping is consistently portrayed as “a problem,” gradually clearing the way for the tobacco industry. The latter quietly continues to thrive by selling cigarettes that cause 68,000 deaths a year in France and account for 20% of all cancers. To date, no one has died from vaping—quite the opposite.
Let us not allow superstition and ignorance to flourish at the expense of science. In a media landscape saturated with messages, on a subject as critical as the fight against tobacco, the lack of recognition and the denigration of vaping and its specialized, responsible, and committed industry inevitably serve the interests of Big Tobacco.