Media Watch: The Echo Struggles Badly with Vaping Causation

The Echo is an institution in Cork, Ireland. First published in 1892, the paper has provided an outlet for the county’s unique voice over the years and is even famous for playing a notable role in Ireland’s revolutionary years. Now owned by the Irish Times Group, it is available in both print and online formats.

Last week, it hosted an op-ed from Dr Catherine Conlon, a public health doctor in Cork, titled Why we need new laws on vaping NOW.

Let’s take a look at the article and see if Dr Conlon can lay out a convincing argument.

The article

The thrust of the article is somewhat confusing. It is, in essence, a call for regulations that are already in place under Ireland’s Public Health (Tobacco Products and Nicotine Inhaling Products) Act 2023. Parts of the bill that are currently in effect include a ban on sales to individuals under 18, heavy advertising restrictions, and fixed penalties for anyone who sells products to minors. These aspects of the bill have been “live” for at least a year.

What Conlon partly wants progress on is the enforcement of these laws. She’s not the first public health figure to show surprise when prohibition does not have its intended effect. Indeed, as Irish history has shown, banning drugs, abortion, and gambling did little to address the underlying causes and instead created dangerous black markets that actually increased risk for the public.

Conlon highlights 2025 test purchase efforts by the Health Service Executive (HSE), where about 16% of retailers were noncompliant. The implication is that Ireland’s vape laws would be effective if they were enforced correctly. The lack of awareness about the black market, peer-to-peer selling, and the availability of vapes bought via social media is stark.

Sadly, things don’t get better.

Sophistry and misinformation

Conlon opens the article by highlighting a study published in Tobacco Control by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the University of York, titled Vaping and harm in young people: umbrella review.

The highly-publicised review was savaged when it came out for several reasons, including:

• Near-exclusive use of “low or critically low quality” studies (55 out of 56).
• Zero understanding of common liability.
• Reviving the totally debunked “gateway hypothesis” through a misunderstanding of causality.

Of course, none of this criticism exists in Conlon’s orbit. She just cites the study as if it were solid work, stating:

This comprehensive research paper, published in Tobacco Control, cements the mounting evidence that marketing of vapes to children is always unacceptable and shows why robust restrictions on the tobacco industry that control the vaping market are so important.

The fact is that there is a set of people who are more likely to both use and enjoy nicotine. It’s not that vaping meant they were suddenly open to smoking; it’s more that they were always going to be in the risk category for using cigarettes.

Vaping is not a gateway; if it were, we’d see rising smoking rates among youths that are indexed to vaping initiation. We don’t, so using this misunderstanding as a reason for additional regulations is not good enough.

Another worrying aspect of Conlon’s statement is a total misunderstanding of the vaping market itself. She believes the tobacco industry controls the vaping market. This statement is not grounded in reality, because 80% of the vapes in Ireland come from Shenzhen in China.

A public health figure should be able to make things easier for people to understand. They should put time into research that the general public can’t, because they have to live, work, and raise children. Instead, Conlon muddies the water with misinformation and can’t evaluate the studies she quotes for quality. Ireland deserves better.

Health claims

The following section effectively highlights why the arrogance of public health experts can lead them to overestimate their knowledge on a particular issue. Let’s take a look at a paragraph from the EchoLive article about the health risks of vaping to demonstrate what I mean:

(i) No one says vapes are harmless. They are dramatically less harmful than cigarettes and pose a minor risk, but that’s not to say they are risk-free. Like coffee, alcohol, fast food, red meat, and a whole host of other activities that make life livable, vapes are not 100% safe for consumption. People need accurate assessments so they can make informed choices for themselves.

(ii) Diacetyl has been banned from vape products in the European Union since 2016. I don’t know where Conlon is getting her information from, but it’s not up to date.

(iii) While some vapes do contain nickel, tin, and lead, the levels are well below recommended daily exposure, especially when a device is used correctly.

Research that shows these contaminants are beyond safe levels relies on abusing vapes in a way that no one uses them. i.e., repeatedly firing them with tiny breaks until the coil has burnt to a crisp, and then being shocked that some of the burnt coil has leaked into the liquid.

(iv) Claims that nicotine affects brain development are derived from experiments on mice that create improbable and extreme conditions. Not that long ago, smoking among teens was 40% but 40% of people didn’t develop brain damage.

(v) The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland’s toxicological analysis was an AI model based on theoretical pyrolysis calculations that do not accurately represent the operation of e-cigarettes under typical usage conditions. So, the results are faulty and speculative.

In other words, Conlon is not on top of this debate, doesn’t know what is or isn’t in vapes, and is just an unthinking, uncritical funnel for tobacco control ideas. She has nothing to add to the debate, but lacks the self-awareness to understand that.

Final thoughts

Although we’ve just highlighted a few of the errors and misinformation in Dr Conlon’s article, sadly, there are many more. Indeed, public health figures need to be well-versed in a wide range of topics, which can limit their expertise in any one area. It appears that Conlon, like many other media-savvy public health figures, utilises her credentials to amplify typical WHO arguments, seemingly unaware that the vaping public has heard and debunked these claims for nearly two decades.