A Rebound Study Of Disdain Towards Vapers & Vaping Science?

by Pippa Starr

22 April 2025

On March 29, 2025 Pam Mulholland & Kim Bure wrote and published a highly informative article on the ALIVE advocacy movement website titled "What You Don't Know About Vaping In Australia" which contained links to submissions to the most recent parliamentary vaping inquiry.

The article clearly outlined how 84% of submissions were opposed to the subsequent legislation that was put in place in July last year that put vapes behind chemist counters.

Since then, it has been an internationally recognised failure!

We have seen a massive takeover of vaping product sales by the black market as only 1 in 4 chemists want to stock an extremely limited range of vapes.

Chemists now even try to sell cheap brightly colored Chinese vapes on the shop floor in desperation to compete with the black market when they are meant to be behind the counter. It appears to be a last-ditch effort to try and recoup losses made on investing in stocking vaping products that Mark Butler promised would be a roaring success.

But if you ask the other people who made up the other 16% of submissions, they may tell you how the current regime has been a failure that has significantly contributed to black market turf wars causing over 220 firebombings and innocent deaths as they fight over easily made profits.

I think Senator Ross Cadell recently said it best when he said,

"Well, they can look out the window and they can see what failure looks like now!"

Within 3 days of the release of the "What You Don't Know About Vaping In Australia" article, a new study suddenly appeared, seemingly refuting the premise that genuine people with real science and authentic improved lived experiences from vaping must somehow be part of a big tobacco ploy.

Maybe is was the authentic quotes like these they found to be inconvenient?:

"I’m 65 years young and my journey to quitting cigarettes took almost 40 years. 40 years of failing miserably with each attempt. I tried everything from patches to hypnosis. Many more than once or twice, I didn’t want to stop trying. I moved to live in the UK in 2014 until 2016. My husband, also a smoker was admitted to the hospital for pneumonia. Our UK doctor….made the suggestion we try vaping. We went directly to (that) vape shop…. We had nothing to lose. That day, my husband and I both quit cigarette smoking."

or

"I am 59 years old and started smoking at the age of 15. When I was 44 years old I was diagnosed with grade 3 breast cancer and I was desperate to give up smoking. The doctor suggested patches and other regular stop smoking devices but after trying them all I still couldn’t stop smoking for more than a day….I then researched alternative methods and I decided to try vaping. I ordered an e-cig look alike from America and since the day I took up vaping I have not touched a cigarette, my health has improved greatly.

It's not the first time opponents have executed a load of "logical fallacy" bombs to support their narrative, that happens to help keep them stay in a living on the public purse under the guise of somehow being public health superheros.

However, in this age of public health populism, science is too often wielded as a rhetorical weapon rather than a tool for understanding. Nowhere is this more evident than in the new study by Anderson, Jones, and Jongenelis (2025):

“Industry actor communication practices in submissions on electronic nicotine delivery system (ENDS) policy in Australia.” Published in Tobacco Control.

This paper purports to uncover a pattern of deception and manipulation among stakeholders advocating for vaping, but it ultimately collapses under the weight of its own biases and blind spots.

At first glance, the study seems meticulous: 196 submissions to 13 public consultations, coded for logical fallacies, evidential misuse, and self-interest. But dig deeper and a worrying pattern emerges, not of industry manipulation, but of a systemic effort to delegitimise harm reduction advocacy through selective framing and ideologically driven interpretation.

The Flawed Premise: Industry = Misinformation

The study assumes that commercial interest automatically discredits the validity of any

pro-vaping argument. But here’s the problem: not all stakeholders with a financial stake are Big Tobacco cronies. In fact, as the paper itself notes, most submissions came from small retailers, advocacy groups, and independent actors, those who often work at the frontline of helping smokers transition away from combustible tobacco.

To paint these voices with the same brush as transnational tobacco conglomerates is both intellectually lazy and ethically dubious. If a small vape shop owner reports firsthand success stories from customers who quit smoking, is that "anecdotal evidence" or a

real-world outcome?

Apparently, unless it’s a peer-reviewed RCT, it’s dismissed as weak evidence. But in doing so, the study discards the kind of lived experience that health policy is supposed to be grounded in.

Cherry-Picking and the Fallacy of Fallacies

The authors claim an astonishing 96% of submissions misused evidence and 88% contained logical fallacies. But their bar for what counts as "misuse" is troublingly low. Submissions were marked down for citing conflict-of-interest studies, even when those studies were publicly available, methodologically sound, and aligned with other independent findings. Yet nowhere does the paper scrutinise anti-vaping narratives, many of which have demonstrably misrepresented harms, such as the long-debunked claims around EVALI or “popcorn lung”​​​.

Logical fallacies? The study highlights the “bandwagon fallacy” where submissions argued Australia should follow the example of countries like the UK or New Zealand. But that’s not a fallacy, it’s policy benchmarking, a common and rational practice in evidence-based governance.

If citing the success of the UK’s liberal and regulated vaping market is considered “fallacious,” one wonders what would pass muster.

Ignoring the Independent Evidence Base

This is perhaps the most egregious flaw: the study never engages with the substantial body of independent, peer-reviewed evidence supporting vaping as a harm reduction tool. Let’s name a few:

• NHS England confirms vaping is substantially less harmful than smoking and one of the most effective stop-smoking aids​.

• The Royal College of Physicians supports the wide promotion of e-cigarettes as a smoking substitute​.

• Cancer Research UK finds no evidence that vaping causes cancer and stresses its lower risk profile compared to smoking​.

• The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists advocates vaping as a critical harm reduction tool, especially for people with mental health conditions​.

These aren’t fringe opinions—they are the consensus among leading health organisations. Yet none are acknowledged in the study’s sweeping claims of misinformation.

The Real Question: Who’s Misinforming Whom?

If the aim of this paper was to inoculate policymakers against manipulation, it may have succeeded, but not in the way the authors intended.

By casting any dissenting or alternative regulatory viewpoint as “industry interference,” the study discourages open, evidence-informed debate. That’s dangerous.

Vaping is not risk-free. But for the millions of Australians who still smoke, and for whom quitting through willpower, patches, or medications hasn’t worked, nicotine vaping remains one of the most promising tools to avoid early death​​. To call for the wholesale exclusion of these voices from policy discussions, as the authors implicitly suggest, is to rob public health of real-world pragmatism.

Ideology is Not Evidence

Anderson, Jones & Jongenelis deserve credit for rigorous coding and transparency in method. But the paper suffers from an overriding bias: a fundamental suspicion of harm reduction.

In seeking to expose bad actors, it risks throwing out honest advocates and evidence-based policy proposals. We must do better than that.

Real tobacco control means welcoming every tool in the arsenal, including vaping, when backed by science. And real science means looking at all the evidence, not just the bits that fit the narrative.

Let’s not let public health become a casualty of its own moral certainties!