Wendy Zuckerman

He told me, you know, of course he knows that this is not rock solid evidence.

We don't have a study in thousands of people where you see that those who vape have higher rates of cancer than those who don't vape.

You know, like you mentioned, Rose, part of that is because of this messiness that a lot of vapors, and particularly older vapors, are smokers too, or they used to be smokers.

But the other issue here is also time.

Bernard estimates we'd need around three decades before you might see that cancer signature, because cancer takes a really long time to develop, even for cigarette smokers.

And vaping was only invented in the 2000s.

That's actually why they call it the noughties.

Not true.

No.

Okay.

So I asked Bernard, and why not wait for better evidence before making this claim?

Well, I want you to explain it so that we can take to our audience.

I mean, the truth is a lot of the team, the whole team at Science Versus struggled with this.

And so what we did, we know our limitations.

We're podcasters.

We don't write letters to editors.

So we surveyed.

A bunch of researchers who study vaping and tobacco control to see what they make of all this.

We asked them outright, does vaping cause cancer?

We heard back from 35 scientists and the results were kind of all over the map.