Trump administration readies ban on flavored e-cigarettes amid outbreak of vaping-related deaths
CNBC
Condolences to the victims but do six deaths in a country of 320 million people really represent an “outbreak”?
Also, “vaping-related deaths” is bullshit as the article itself says in the first paragraph:
The Trump administration is preparing to ban flavored e-cigarettes as federal health officials call for restrictions to combat an outbreak of a mysterious lung disease . . .
“Mysterious lung disease.” In the headline, vaping is flat-out killing people; in the article it’s a mystery disease.
I’ve read specifically about three of the deaths. One was here in Southern California, in Los Angeles County. The deceased was described as an older adult male, at least 55 years old, with chronic health conditions.
A woman who died in Kansas was older than 50 and had a history of health problems.
In Minnesota, the state’s “first known vaping-related death” was a person over 65 years with a history of lung problems.
The pattern seems to be that a not-young person in poor health dies and the death is attributed to vaping.
It’s not possible. It’s not possible to say what caused an illness in one particular person.
A heavy smoker gets lung cancer. Did smoking cause the lung cancer? There’s no way to know that. Because non-smokers also get lung cancer.
Not as often as smokers but they do. We can look at a population and say that smoking strongly correlates with lung cancer, but for one person, there is no way to know.
Symptoms of the “mysterious lung disease” include shortness of breath, fatigue, chest pain and vomiting, all of which existed before the invention of vaping and have a long list of potential causes.
