Putting The 2nd Death Related To Vaping Into Perspective

Today, The Hill reported that a second person has died from something that could be considered “vaping-related.” This is good news for anti-vaping activists, after all, now they have a second person, not just a first one. They knew they couldn’t prove vaping is as bad as smoking, because it’s not, so they just go with the whole “the person who died also did this bad thing,” technique.

However, many on the anti-vaping side seem to leave out this part:

“We don’t yet know the exact cause of these illnesses — whether they’re caused by contaminants, ingredients in the liquid or something else, such as the device itself,” said Dr. Ann Thomas of the Oregon Health Authority.

Well what do you know? Not even the doctor who pronounced him dead directly said she has no idea if vaping caused the lung damage that killed him.

Maybe this is because there is simply no known way the small amount of chemicals in e-cigarettes or the one thing in cannabis (which is what he vaped, but similar arguments have been made about e-cigarettes so I chose to lump that in as well) could compare to the damage done by smoking.

Edit: Thanks to @Ratticorn from Twitter for pointing this out. Turns out both of these deaths are also from smoking black market cannabis, not something brought from stores. Meaning using this as a reason to restrict legal purchases makes no sense.

The CDC has not yet managed to link the vast majority of cases of injury, let alone death, with vaping. This has not stopped the FDA who have been banning various forms of advertising and trying every single trick in the book to ban something before we could consider it harmful.

But lets actually do the one thing the anti-vaping activists do not want us to do, look at actual numbers.

The first death related to vaping was reported about a month ago, so we’ll say one person dies of vaping every month. That would mean that 12 people will die of vaping every single year. This would make vaping 40,000 times safer than normal cigarettes.

In fact, 12 people dying would make vaping over 200 times safer than the MMR vaccine. That’s quite an achievement considering we give newborns vaccines but won’t allow teenagers to vape. If two people die from medical treatment — and more than two people have died from all forms of medical treatment — we tend to not see it as a big deal.

In fact, baths and chocking have killed more than vaping at this rate. I don’t see any politicians talking about banning water and food. At this point, if we’re just going to ban everything even mildly dangerous we might as well just move in that direction.