Wendy Zuckerman

Today you can find the foundation for a smoke-free world whose goal is the end of tobacco use achieved through funding research and promoting innovation.

They are entirely, entirely funded by Big Tobacco.

And just a couple of years ago, they changed their name, by the way, to Global Action to End Smoking.

Wow.

And this is just one of these groups.

Other companies that sell these products are out there funding science too.

Yes, that is what I wanted to know.

Okay, so around 10 years ago, a researcher in Denmark did one of the first systematic reviews on the health effects of e-cigarettes, which looked at almost 100 studies.

And then she analyzed all the conflicts of interest.

Do you want to guess what percentage of the studies had some industry conflict of interest?

50%?

It was 35%.

Okay, that's still pretty high.

And there's other studies that have kind of looked at this problem in slightly different ways.

They find that maybe it's one in four, so 24%, had disclosed industry funding.

Which, you know, one in three, one in four studies in this space are industry funded.

I mean, it's not good.

And, of course, unsurprisingly, research shows that studies that are industry funded in this space are more likely to say things like vaping is either harmless or be pro-vaping more generally.

So you say things like, wow, they look pretty good compared to cigarettes.

Yeah.