It’s a scenario that has become all too familiar. Tobacco harm reduction experts recently scrambled to tackle alarmist news coverage, based on an incomplete, unpublished study purportedly showing that vapes are as harmful as cigarettes.
Major newspapers in the United Kingdom picked it up. “Vaping horror,” proclaimed the Mirror on February 23, in an article that began: “Vaping may be more dangerous to the body than cigarettes—putting long-term users at risk of dementia, heart disease and organ failure, according to the author of a bombshell study.”
The Manchester Evening News ran the same article simultaneously; the Express also covered the “shocking findings.”
The following day, the Standard and the Daily Mail chimed in, the latter under the headline: “Vaping ‘more dangerous than smoking’, bombshell first-of-its-kind study reveals—it raises risk of THREE deadly diseases.” By then, the story had crossed the Atlantic to the New York Post.
“Many will be horrified to know the truth.”
The featured study was conducted at Manchester Metropolitan University. The lead researcher, Dr. Maxime Boidin, was quoted as saying: “What we have found is the dangers for someone who keeps vaping are no different from smokers.”
“You see a lot more people vaping these days because they don’t think it’s too bad,” he said. “Many will be horrified to know the truth.”
Experts have labeled Dr. Boidin “irresponsible” for making bombastic claims without adequate evidence or scrutiny.
Proponents of tobacco harm reduction are used to negative media stories without justification, including those that are based, tellingly, on research that has yet to be published and peer-reviewed. But even in that context, this example, given the enormity of the claims, “was pretty special,” Clive Bates, of Counterfactual Consulting, told Filter.
“Sometimes things are so outrageous you just have to do something—this was one of those times.”
Bates, a former director of Action on Smoking and Health (UK), noted that it would be a “full-time job” to rigorously refute all the anti-vaping claims made in media. But, “sometimes things are so outrageous you just have to do something—this was one of those times.”
So he wrote to Dr. Boidin, in a letter which he published.
“I am disturbed by what you are doing with this study,” he wrote, pointing out various problems with the promotion of such claims without producing the evidence—and the existence of a large body of evidence to the contrary. “What you have done here ranks with the worst kind of misinformation of the tobacco industry of the 1970s and will likely have the same effect—more smoking, disease, and death.”
Coverage of the study has also received numerous community notes on social media.
“The study was not published, not even complete, and could never show what the lead investigator claimed,” Bates told Filter. “Yet he made an outrageous claim, equating smoking and vaping risks and scaremongering about dementia and organ failure. This was a study of a few young adult vapers on exercise bikes. How could he possibly make such claims?”
The study looked at participants with similar fitness levels and an average age of 27. “They were given regular stress tests to measure the elasticity of their blood vessels and the speed of blood flow to their brains,” the Mirror reported. “For 12 hours prior to testing, they consumed only water and desisted from vaping, smoking and exercise.”
The lack of transparency inherent to unpublished methodologies and findings leaves expert observers to infer what they can.
Dr. Michael Siegel, professor of public health and community medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine, has been conducting research in the tobacco control field for three decades.
He took to his blog to rebuke what he called “a fatally flawed study.”
“The fatal flaw is that the researchers apparently failed to confirm that the vapers were not ex-smokers,” he wrote. “Because the overwhelming majority of vapers are using e-cigarettes in an attempt to quit smoking, it is highly likely that the vapers in this study were ex-smokers.”
“The correct way to conduct this study would have been to compare never smokers who vaped with never smokers who never vaped with smokers,” he continued. “It certainly appears that this was not done since I would expect that if it were, the researchers would have been eager to point that out.”
The lack of transparency inherent to unpublished methodologies and findings leaves expert observers to infer what they can. “The public and other scientists have very little idea what methods were used and whether the conclusions are valid given the study design,” Siegel told Filter.
“The problem is that if Boidin’s study is later changed or its conclusions questioned, it’s too late. The public has already absorbed what was reported.”
Dr. Riccardo Polosa, professor of internal medicine at the University of Catania, Italy, said his own and other peer-reviewed studies have shown that vaping is much less harmful than smoking.
“That doesn’t mean it’s risk-free, but compared to the thousands of toxic chemicals in cigarette smoke, vaping is a safer alternative for smokers who want to reduce harm,” he told Filter.
Polsa said one of the biggest proven benefits of switching from cigarettes to vapes is improved lung function and few respiratory symptoms. “There’s also evidence that switching to vaping lowers cardiovascular risk markers, even though nicotine itself can still raise heart rate and blood pressure.”
But there are justified fears that such peer-reviewed findings will be drowned out, when incomplete research—potentially plain wrong—becomes tabloid fodder.
Myths surrounding vapes have been shown to deter people from quitting cigarettes. In 2024, 85 percent of adults who smoked in England believed vaping to be as harmful as smoking or worse.
“The problem is that if Boidin’s study is later changed or its conclusions questioned, it’s too late,” Seigel said. “The public has already absorbed what was reported by the press and is unlikely to pay much attention to a retraction.”
Polosa agreed that reporting on unpublished studies like the recent example is “especially irresponsible.”
“Unchecked claims can keep misconceptions alive and even nudge people toward riskier choices, like sticking to smoking instead of switching to safer alternatives,” he said.
“This is how death spiral works for the news media.”
Newspapers in the UK, including the Mirror, are subject to an Editors’ Code of Practice to avoid publishing “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information.”
“I don’t see how they can be accurate if they report studies that are not published, not peer-reviewed, and not open to scrutiny unless the journalist happens to know a lot about the cardiovascular system and nicotine,” Bates said.
For the purpose of “clickbait,” he added, the tabloids and Dr. Boidin had in this case “cooked up a right shocker.”
“This is how death spiral works for the news media,” Bates reflected. “People lose trust in accuracy and objectivity, and then the readership narrows to a few people who want ever more extreme alarmism to keep their attention. It may get a lot of eyeballs once or a few times, but it ends in madness, emptiness and despair.”
Photograph of British tabloids by Bobbie Johnson via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 2.0
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