Wendy Zukerman

It's bad for science more broadly.

You know, if there was no potential benefit to vaping, it would be very easy to close the book on this to say like, OK, this is enough evidence to just assume it does and tell people quit it.

Don't vape.

I'd be like, of course, if there is evidence that this thing, you know, playing the kazoo.

Is potentially carcinogenic.

And we have animal studies.

We have petri dish studies.

We have kazoo players have higher levels of this chemical that causes cancer.

Everyone stop playing the kazoo.

I think that would be, even though we don't have studies saying kazoo players get tons of cancer and die.

And it irritates people around you with its secondhand kazooing.

Yes.

But this is totally ignoring the fact that there is a potential benefit of vaping, and that's for people who smoke.

And so if you're evaluating vaping as its own thing, ignoring the fact that its major purpose is as a smoking cessation device to get people to stop smoking, when it's very hard to do that, you're missing like a huge part of the argument here.

Wild claim.

That's where scientists put their wild claims is in the last line of their last paragraph.

So I looked into that claim, and what's interesting is that there are other scientists who say we should rethink this idea that vaping is flat out better for you compared to smoking.

Well, I mean...

In Bernard's paper, one of the things he cites to make this case that vaping is really bad is a review paper that came out a couple years ago.

And this one was looking mostly at heart and lung problems in people who smoke or vape.