PRESS RELEASE - 24/01/2020
The World Health Organization is once again at the root of a controversy surrounding vape. Picked up by much of the French press, the key words "absence of doubt" about the harmfulness of e-cigarettes headline articles on the subject. Fivape condemns this piecemeal media treatment and the WHO's ambiguous position on vaping.
The update of the FAQ dedicated to e-cigarettes on the WHO website(here), the publication of a new article(here), ... and two tweets. That's all it took for a methodical, and now well-honed, anti-vaping discourse to flourish all over the web. It is in these publications, presented in the form of questions and answers, that the WHO explicitly (and without sourcing at any point) makes its peremptory assertions.
It states that "electronic cigarettes are harmful to health", that there is "insufficient evidence to encourage their use in smoking cessation" and that "they are by no means safe products".
Too much is too much. On what studies does the WHO base such a firm dismissal of vape as a smoking cessation option? Why does it deny the existence of reliable studies favorable to vape products?
This is not the first time that the WHO has failed to back up its statements with scientific rigor. This was already the case last July, when the media seized on the "indisputable harmfulness" of electronic cigarettes, and FIVAPE denounced the total absence of scientific sources in the offending report in a press release.
Vaping professionals, for their part, base their arguments on scientific evidence derived from independent studies. Science tells us that :
- electronic cigarettes are at least 95% less harmful than tobacco cigarettes [1].
- vaping products are one of the most popular ways for smokers to quit with help, ahead of nicotine substitutes [2].
- they are twice as effective as the latter in helping smokers quit [3].
Santé Publique France [4] confirms these results, pointing out that e-cigarettes are used by over 99% of smokers or ex-smokers to quit or stay smoke-free, and have helped over 700,000 people quit smoking.
We therefore call on the WHO to stop comparing the alleged harmfulness of e-cigarettes with the proven extreme harmfulness of tobacco cigarettes, and to stop issuing pointless warnings against vape.
The result is clear and catastrophic: smokers are being kept smoking, for the wrong reasons, diverting them from the best smoking risk reduction solution available. This is too important a public health issue not to be weighed and considered before being presented publicly.
And we ask the press to carry out the necessary checks before writing an article: the WHO recommendations concerning the safety of vaping products have already been in force in France since 2016. The products of our professionals, committed and independent of the tobacco industry, have enabled hundreds of thousands of French people to quit smoking without a single health alert having been issued about them for almost ten years.
Sources :
[1] Public Health England, Smokefree 'Health Harms' - Impact of smoking vs vaping demonstration, December 2018.
[2] Santé Publique France, Tentatives d'arrêt du tabac au dernier trimestre 2016 et lien avec Mois sans tabac : premiers résultats observés dans le Baromètre santé 2017, May 2018.
[3] New England Journal Of medicine, A Randomized Trial of E-Cigarettes versus Nicotine-Replacement Therapy, 2019.
[4] Santé Publique France, Baromètre de santé publique France 2017 - Usage de la cigarette électronique, tabagisme et opinions des 18-75 ans, June 2019 "