Misinformation By Parents Against Vaping E-Cigarettes Appears to Be Part of a Longer-Term Campaign of Deception

Yesterday, I reported that Parents Against Vaping E-Cigarettes (PAVE) is essentially lying on its website about the prevalence of daily e-cigarette use among youth. The site claims that "More than 1 in 4 youth use e-cigarettes daily." Using data from the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), I showed that the actual proportion of youth who use e-cigarettes daily is 1.6%, meaning that PAVE is exaggerating this statistic by a factor of 16.

I had assumed that this was just a one-time error and that PAVE was just misreporting data from the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey.

But how wrong I was.

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With the use of the Wayback Machine, I was able to find that PAVE made the identical fallacious claim nearly one year ago that it stated was based on the results of the 2023 National Youth Tobacco Survey. Their web site on February 11, 2024 stated: "More than 1 in 4 youth use e-cigarettes daily" and attributed this to the 2023 NYTS.

So it appears that this deception has now been going on through two cycles of the release of the NYTS. 

Unfortunately, this misinformation seems to be spreading rapidly, probably from PAVE to other organizations and even supposedly reputable health agencies. The PAVE misinformation appears to have first appeared on or around February 11, 2024. On March 1, 2024, the New Haven Health Department included this fallacious claim in a letter to the city council. The letter stated: "Nationally, more than 1 in 4 youth use e-cigarettes daily and almost 9 out of 10 use flavored e-cigarettes." The fact that the second claim follows the first on the PAVE website suggests that this may be where the New Haven Health Department obtained this erroneous information.

Beacon Mental Health appears to have picked up the claim shortly before November 7, 2024, and used it to promote a conference on vaping and youth that it was cosponsoring with the North Kansas City Hospital. In promoting this November 7 event, they asked: "Did you know that nationally, more than 1 in 4 youth use e-cigarettes daily?"

The Wilson Area School District (Easton, PA) picked up the same claim: "Teen vaping has become a serious health issue in the United States. According to the annual National Youth Tobacco Survey,  more than 1 in 4 youth use e-cigarettes daily and almost 9 out of 10 use flavored e-cigarettes."

The same claim was picked up by the Johnson County (KS) government: "More than 1 in 4 youth use e-cigarettes daily." This was almost certainly derived from PAVE, as they appear to have copied it directly from PAVE's web site.

This story shows how misinformation can spread rapidly over the internet and eventually come to dominate public "knowledge." This is why it is so important for public health organizations like PAVE to be honest and accurate in their communications.

Why Does Parents Against Vaping E-Cigarettes (PAVE) Have to Lie in Order to Scare Parents?

If I seriously thought that one-fourth of today's youth were vaping e-cigarettes daily, I would be quite alarmed. Daily use suggests possible addiction and so if 25% of all youth were vaping daily, we would be talking about 6.25 million middle-school and high-school students who are vaping every day. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of every day youth e-cigarette users are not just vaping nicotine, but they are also using THC vapes, mostly off the black market. So if this statistic were true, it would drastically change my assessment of the relative benefits of electronic cigarettes for adult smoking cessation compared to the risks for youth vaping and addiction.

Well, according to Parents Against Vaping E-Cigarettes (PAVE), this very statistic is in fact true! According to PAVE: "More than 1 in 4 youth use e-cigarettes daily." So it's actually more than 25% of youth who are daily e-cigarette users. This means there are well over 6 million youth daily vapers. Even worse, only 3.2% of adults vape daily, so the proportion of youth who vape daily is 8 times higher than the proportion of adults who vape daily. Perhaps even more alarming, this means that for 2 adult vapers, there is one youth daily vaper.

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There's only one problem with this statistic from PAVE ...

...

...

... It isn't true!

According to data from the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey, the proportion of youth who use e-cigarettes daily is not 25%, it is 1.6%. So PAVE is off by a factor of 16. Another way of saying this is that PAVE has inflated the proportion of youth who use e-cigarettes daily by 16 times its actual value in an apparent effort to create quite a scare among parents and the public at large.

Compare PAVE's "facts" with those of the FDA:

PAVE - More than 25% of youth use e-cigarettes daily.

FDA - Only 1.6% of youth use e-cigarettes daily. 

So how does PAVE get this 25% number? Well, you might call it sleight-of-hand. It turns out that of youth e-cigarette users, more than 25% are daily users (26.3%). However, only 5.9% of youth are e-cigarette users, so the proportion of youth who are daily e-cigarettes users is 26.3% times 5.9%, which is 1.6%.

The truth is that PAVE is not telling the truth when they claim that more than 1 in 4 youth use e-cigarettes daily. The truth is that 1 in 62 youth use e-cigarettes daily.

So why lie? 

Possibly it's because 1 in 4 youth sounds way more alarming than 1 in 62 youth. Somehow 1 in 62 youth doesn't quite have the same kick as 1 in 4. 

But why the need to lie in the first place? Possibly it's because the youth e-cigarette craze has subsided somewhat and the truthful statistics just aren't alarming enough to make youth vaping the kind of catastrophic problem that PAVE would like to promote it as.

The problem is that truth, honesty, and transparency are three important core values of public health. We do not misrepresent statistics in order to scare people. We do not provide false statistics to the public in order to increase public concern about public health problems. In other words, the ends of getting the public to take action do not justify the means of lying to or deceiving the public.