Tag Archives: CDC

My recent contribution to Clive’s weekly reading list

Posted on 24 November 2018 by | 1 comment

by Carl V Phillips

As some of you know, Clive Bates puts out a weekly somewhat-annotated list of PubMed-indexed articles that are related to low-risk tobacco products and/or tobacco harm reduction (the search string for that appears at the end of what follow). It is a great resource; if you do not receive it, I am sure he would be glad to add you to the distribution list. As part of a planned projected that I have alluded to before, I am working on how to reinterpret this as an annotated weekly suggested reading (or knowing-about) list. To that end, this week I was a “guest editor” for Clive’s distribution list, and I thought I should share what I wrote here to broaden the audience. Yes, it is a little weird to publish a one-off “weekly reading” that is mostly based on an existing format that you might not be familiar with. But you should be able to get the idea. Hopefully I will be producing one every week before too long.

In the meantime, here is what I wrote that went out via Clive’s distribution lists. Sorry for the weird formatting — it is an artifact of the way the original PubMed search was formatted. Yes, I could have fixed the for aesthetics to re-optimize for this blog’s formatting, but since they do not hinder comprehension, I am not going to bother — sorry.

Greetings everyone. Carl V Phillips here, doing Clive’s list this week. I am trying out a new format for it, as follows: (1) They are not listed in the order that popped from the PubMed search string, but rather is in order of how worth reading they are. Obviously this is my own rough blend of various considerations, including importance of what is being addressed, value of what was produced, how potentially influential it is, and how much reader effort it takes to get value from it (note that I put relatively little weight on the latter). I have left the serial numbers from the search on the entries in case anyone wants to recreate the usual ordering. I add a full-text link if I think there is anyone other than specialists in the particular area would want to look at the full text. (2) I am not limiting this to PubMed-indexed papers. I am including popular press and policy statements (and would have included blogs but there were not any apparent candidates this week).

Continue reading →

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Remember, what the US government wants to do to ecigs, they have already done to smokeless tobacco

Posted on 2 November 2015 by | 16 comments

by Carl V Phillips

Well, a lot has happened during my blog hiatus. I trust I do not need to tell anyone interested in THR that things in the US e-cigarette world “got real”, with the US FDA finally moving ahead with “deeming” e-cigarettes. Why, exactly, it was suddenly more real that it was for the last year or two — during which it was clear that this was coming soon — I will leave to the behavioral economists. But it does seem to have changed the mood. The last time I posted here, CASAA membership was about 70,000 and today is north of 110,000 and climbing fast. So this is probably a good time to give people new to this world a primer, and remind everyone else, that the US government has a long history of being hostile toward THR.

Few who actively oppose FDA’s plans need any additional reasons to object to them. It is sufficient to know that this is not actually regulation, but a de facto ban of the entire category that might — or might not — be followed by granting exceptions to the ban for a handful of closed-system e-cigarettes. (I will detail why this is the right way to think about it in my next post.) But there are people on the fence. Perhaps more important, there are many opponents of banning e-cigarettes who are naively optimistic, expecting reasonable behavior from our government once they implement this rule. Continue reading →

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The @CDCTobaccoFree follies: propaganda, promotion of scientific illiteracy, and censorship

Posted on 1 July 2015 by | 2 comments

by Carl V Phillips

The twitter feed from the anti-tobacco liar branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is one of the more pathetic efforts of our government. I will circle back to its worst problems, but for now I will just observe that they rarely get 10 retweets of anything or positive comments, including from their own sympathizers. Mostly the CDC tweets just generate replies from the public, criticizing their stupid claims and lies. Those of you who follow me on twitter see my hacked MTs of their posts, translating them into what it really means.

So a funny thing happened yesterday: They were well on their way to getting 100 or more retweets of a post and numerous positive comments. We will never know how many they would have gotten because they deleted it, an act that is clearly inappropriate and pretty clearly a violation of government records and communications rules. Continue reading →

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New York Times makes clear that they object to Joe Nocera’s honesty

Posted on 23 April 2015 by | 19 comments

by Carl V Phillips

Today, the New York Times Editorial Board, in an apparent backlash against their excellent columnist (one of the two), Joe Nocera, exercising his autonomy to write something honest about e-cigarettes, published both an anti-ecig screed by two leading liars and a general anti-THR screed of their own (mostly about e-cigarettes, though the headline was about smokeless tobacco). Needless to say, both are thick with lies. Honestly, they are pretty boring, but for the record, I thought I should call out a few points. Continue reading →

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CDC prepares to launch massive anti-ecig lie campaign

Posted on 26 March 2015 by | 13 comments

by Carl V Phillips

In a move whose dishonesty, flouting of government ethics, and abuse of the interests of the citizenry are as great as NSA spying or concocting fake casus belli, the CDC has announced that it plans to try to discourage smokers from switching to e-cigarettes. The plan is recounted in this Wall Street Journal article. This effort could easily cause more American deaths than the Iraq war; indeed, if it takes off, it could cause more total deaths.

CDC’s decades of anti-THR lies about smokeless tobacco have played a major role in discouraging smokers from switching throughout the world, and the toll from that is huge. (Ironically, many vapers and e-cigarette supporters still believe those lies. Stockholm syndrome maybe?) That effort caused the early deaths of tens of thousands, if not millions, of people. Now they seem to be ramping up their simmering attacks on e-cigarettes to another full-blown homicidal campaign.

Continue reading →

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New CDC study on how to write conclusions that do not follow from the analysis

Posted on 24 March 2015 by | 10 comments

by Carl V Phillips

If you read the title of the paper (peer-reviewed journal article!), “Nicotine and the Developing Human, A Neglected Element in the Electronic Cigarette Debate” by Lucinda J. England, Rebecca E. Bunnell, Terry F. Pechacek, Van T. Tong, MPH, and Tim A. McAfee (all employees of the U.S. CDC), you might think it was a study of the effects of nicotine. But upon reading the abstract and noticing that it merely has some vague hand-waving about that, and is mostly about “needed” policy interventions, you would probably think it is instead a policy analysis. But it is neither. It is a case study of how “public health” people do not think that conclusions and policy recommendations need to be based on any analysis whatsoever. Continue reading →

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CDC lies about ecigs and children again (wait, have I used that title before?)

Posted on 11 December 2014 by | 11 comments

by Carl V Phillips

The CDC issued a press release about children and e-cigarettes again today (which is basically just another way of repeating the title of this post). Their headline claim itself is actually true (assuming they know how to count — not a foregone conclusion): More than 16 million children live in states where they can buy e-cigarettes legally. Of course, they don’t happen to mention why this is the case, and they go on to offer other lies. Continue reading →

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CDC lying about e-cigarettes again (outsource)

Posted on 30 September 2014 by | 1 comment

by Carl V Phillips

No time for new analyses here for a few days. You are probably still trying to catch up on the recent deluge anyway. (If you really miss me, you can read the comment I submitted to BMC Public Health about Popova and Ling, based on the previous post.)

In the meantime, I will outsource. Please go read Brad Rodu’s assessment of the latest nonsense and double-talk from CDC.

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