U.S. Adults Now More Frightened by Vaping Than by Smoking, Researchers Say

A study from UT Southwestern Medical Center says U.S. adults have reached a point where they are, on average, more afraid of vaping than of smoking, and the researchers who ran it are asking public health to treat that as a problem to fix, not a fact to accept.

The figures in the study mark a reversal in which direction the public fear points. Thirty percent of the adults surveyed now say nicotine vaping is more harmful than cigarettes, a rise the researchers describe as more than tenfold against earlier baselines. At the same time, the share that correctly understood vaping as less harmful than smoking has fallen from about half of adults to 17 percent, so the group that gets the relative risk right has shrunk by more than a third of the population in the study's read of the trend.

The researchers look at two events as where the shift took hold. The first is the FDA's Real Cost "An Epidemic Is Spreading" campaign, a run of public service messages aimed at young people, which the study is one of the first to tie statistically to a change in how adults are reading the relative risks. The second is the EVALI outbreak of 2019, a period when media coverage of vaping-related lung injury dominated the news cycle and set the public frame for what vaping could do to a body.

The study author, a lung-cancer specialist on the research team, said the finding is the one that concerns him most. The message that now gets delivered, in effect, to a large share of the adult public is that the safer product is the dangerous one, and that is a message that, if it holds, moves toward the harmful product rather than away from it. He said health professionals and public health organizations are at a point where they need to step in and correct it, and that the failure to do so has a cost in the smokers who are not reaching for the alternative the evidence points to.

The study is a U.S. dataset, and the researchers have described the finding across age, sex, race, ethnicity, and smoking status, which puts it outside a single demographic and in the general picture. The result is a piece of evidence in a long-running debate over how much the public has absorbed about the relative risk of vaping, and it is one that the researchers think is pointing the wrong way.