Hey, maybe we can get some synergy between our bad vaping reporting and our bad Covid-19 reporting?

From Media is Woefully Irresponsible on Supposed Link Between Vaping & COVID-19 by Elizabeth Sheld. It is kind of piling on when the mainstream media are doing such a woeful job reporting on a quintessentially unknowable event. Covid-19 may or may not end up being sufficiently lethal in its contagion and fatality rates to warrant doing massive damage to the economy, and particularly to those most economically fragile and precarious.

It is easy to recommend extreme quarantines if you are of a class with sufficient funds and credit that it is an inconvenience from which you will recover. And especially so if you are within a social networking bubble which prevents you seeing the 50% of the population who live paycheck to paycheck.

However, I am not sure any amount of warranted criticism is actually sufficient to motivate the mainstream media to improve their reporting. When normally admired Scandinavian countries (culturally homogenous, high productivity, sophisticated education, etc.) have such variant strategies for dealing with the same condition, it should be a warning to journalists to show at least some humility about the certainty with which they declare policies to be dangerously foolish. See The Science Behind Sweden's 'Relaxed' Coronavirus Strategy by Peter M. Nilsson & Paul W. Franks.

Sheld's report, however, is a useful reminder. The media was terrible in reporting the institutional effort to shield corporate profits, and more importantly state tax revenues arising from tobacco smoking. The powers that be went after vaping with a vengeance on the most meager of science and the press, accustomed to unquestioning press release reporting, and being innumerate, went right along with it. They were the mouthpieces of statist-corporatist interests. Useful idiots in Stalin's terminology.

The same litany of errors and motivated reporting on display with the vaping fiasco is now on display with the Covid-19 reporting. The same press release journalism, the same ideological motivated reasoning, the same partisanship, the same innumeracy, the same absence of fact-checking or useful contextual knowledge.

Like a dog returning to its vomit, the mainstream media returns to its same bad practices.

Doubles down even. "Hey, maybe we can get some synergy between our bad vaping reporting and our bad Covid-19 reporting?" seems to be the thought. From Sheld.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided the media another opportunity to foment vaping-related panic. Little is known as to why some victims of this new virus are more afflicted than others. Such ambiguity presents an opportunity for the media to pick up where they left off only months ago when they were ginning up anti-vaping hysteria via a different culprit: illegal, counterfeit THC cartridges. Journalists frightened the public only to be proven wrong after thorough investigation by the CDC. Have they learned their lesson? Let’s have a look at what they are reporting about vaping and COVID-19.

A New York Post article entitled “Doctors say vaping could make coronavirus worse for young people” tells us that “US doctors are reportedly eyeing vaping as a possible factor in the alarming number of hospitalizations among young adults diagnosed with COVID-19.” Who are these doctors supposedly “eyeing” vaping in COVID-19 diagnoses? The Post offers only one “doctor,” Stanton Glantz, who isn’t a medical doctor but rather a Ph.D. And Glantz isn’t a disinterested scientist, he’s an anti-vape activist whose “scientific” paper linking vaping with heart attacks was recently retracted by a prestigious medical journal. The Journal of the American Heart Association explained, "The editors are concerned that the study conclusion is unreliable." Why should an expert of Glantz’s dubious reliability be referenced in a news report?


CNN recently published “How smoking, vaping and drug use might increase risks from Covid-19.” The article cites Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Volkow wrote on the agency’s blog that “[b]ecause it attacks the lungs, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 could be an especially serious threat to those who smoke tobacco or marijuana or who vape.” (Italics mine.) Volkow’s comment is speculative, but CNN brings in the familiar Glantz to support Volkow’s conjecture. In a phone interview, Glantz told CNN that "[s]ome of my pulmonary [colleagues] have noted people under 30 [with Covid-19] ending up in hospitals and a couple were vapors [sic]." CNN notes that Glanz qualified his assertion, as “there hasn't been enough research or evidence to support whether there's a link.” So why write about it?

A very good article highlighting an institutional failure with a very specific example of flawed reporting.