The basic premise that Juul didn't, "submit sufficient evidence that they are safe," seem suspect in and of itself. How do you prove something isn't dangerous? I can prove it is dangerous with studies, but to prove it isn't dangerous seems like an impossible task.
OP is more interested in the reformulated vaccines from Pfizer/Moderna more specifically tailored to the Omicron variants rather than another shot with the original formulation which has showed waning efficacy against the newest strains.
The OP’s point is that in US (and also almost certainly in Netherlands), you’re not getting the omicron booster, you’re getting original Covid strain booster.
I am fairly grumpy that we didn't get the Moderna SARS-CoV-2 vaccine for 2-5yos months ago. Waiting for Pfizer's data was such a strange policy choice. There may be something going on under the hood here I don't understand, but the behavior of VRBPAC has felt very strange to me.
If you look at the FDA press release it does seem like they seem to have mostly narrowed down the at-risk groups since, I guess they might've also tweaked dosages at this point.
The risk was very minor, and was in hindsight not worth waiting for.
But now that the data is in, though, when your option is two vaccines, one with very minor risk, and one with even less risk, and they are both equally effective, it's obvious that you should prefer the latter.
Not entirely sure about what this refers to, but..
1: The Moderna vaccine is separate from Pfizer/Biontech even if they share technological base.
2: Moderna was discontinued for younger people (below 30yos) in at least some European countries due to slightly higher risk of myocarditis (even if the Pfizer vaccine had slightly lower efficiancy).
Seems like both vaccines are allowed for smaller children in the US now. Over here they put the cutoff for the vaccine at 12-13yos iirc (my older kid got it but not my younger one).
It's only been two and a half years, we're still very early in this pandemic. I'm sure that a few more years, maybe a decade, when everyone who understands vaccines are confident that the entire category of COVID vaccines is safe and effective, we'll have a flu-like assembly line producing new vaccines for the deluge of new variants we'll be facing.
> What blows my mind is cigarettes are on the market but are _definitely_ not safe
The FDA is allowed by law to regulate vapes. The Supreme Court ruled that the FDA wasn't allowed to regulate tobacco. Congress fixed the SC's complaint and since then the FDA has been moving slowly to prevent another (harder to overcome) legal issue from the SC or to lead to prohibition.
That's why the FDA is suddenly proposing rules limiting nicotine and menthol flavoring in cigarettes.
Cigarettes and other tobacco products predate the FDA by hundreds of years and despite the harm they are known to cause, they're essentially 'grandfathered in' because of cultural inertia.
Come off it, please. Juul took out patents showing that their vape had a psychopharmacology similar to cigarettes, which everyone knows are hugely addictive. Juul needs to be killed dead.
I would support this conclusion only if cigarettes, and other tobacco products were similarly banned. Since they're not, Juul should be treated the same.
What it really comes down to is not equal protection under the law, it's big tobacco wants Juul gone.
> What it really comes down to is not equal protection under the law, it's big tobacco wants Juul gone.
This is nonsensical. "Big tobacco" owns Juul. And couching the shutting down of a company addicting kids to nicotine in terms of equal protection is.. bleh.
Philip Morris has a 35 % stake in Juul, so they are at least "medium tobacco". Practically speaking, you can't ban cigarettes right yet, you'll have another Prohibition problem, but sooner or later the cigarette problem will solve itself, everybody agrees that cigarettes are disgusting. Juul on the other hand marketed itself to schoolchildren as a hip and safe alternative. That problem must be addressed.
Cigarettes are clearly going towards being banned. Which is a good thing. But unlike alcohol prohibition, it seems like the current plan is to just try to prevent new users and let the current users smoke until they die (or help them quit if they choose to).
>Cigarettes are clearly going towards being banned. Which is a good thing.
Idealistically only. In reality, expect a lot of societal problems if that happens. Crime increases from black market good and increase assaults from smokers who have had their drug removed. Basically drug war 2.0. Unfortunately most people vote idealistically these days and tend to ignore or not even think about the reality of implementing laws/bans. Even after seeing the horrible effects of drug wars, people still love fighting them.
The second part of the comment you replied to addresses this.
> it seems like the current plan is to just try to prevent new users and let the current users smoke until they die (or help them quit if they choose to).
>>it seems like the current plan is to just try to prevent new users and let the current users smoke until they die (or help them quit if they choose to).
>The second part of the comment you replied to addresses this.
It attempts to address it, but in banning of Juul products, which many ex-smokers used and continue to use to get and stay off cigarettes, is very obviously counterproductive to this assumed objective. Banning Juul will create more cigarette smokers, both ex-smokers and kids who decide to pick up the habit. Full stop.
> Banning Juul will create more cigarette smokers, both ex-smokers and kids who decide to pick up the habit.
In the short term. In the long term cigarette adoption was falling to under 5% in high-school/college kids. Juul reversed the trend and the majority started using nicotine. If we lose 7 years of people getting addicted, we can save the next 21.
Plus, it's not eCigs that are being banned. It's Juul. They're the ones who cannot prove their additives are safe. They could change their juice to make it have less toxic additives.
>In the long term cigarette adoption was falling to under 5% in high-school/college kids. Juul reversed the trend and the majority started using nicotine. If we lose 7 years of people getting addicted, we can save the next 21.
You're conflating two things: cigarettes and nicotine. With a lot of propaganda, repressive sin taxes, and the development of substitutes; the US managed to lower the cigarette smoking rate since the 60s. Why do you think these techniques are even still relevant and will work the same on nicotine substitutes? That seems to be what you are using to support the ban.
Also, this is a "for the children," argument.
>Plus, it's not eCigs that are being banned. It's Juul.
Ya that's the weird thing. The shelves are filled with competitors, have they all "proven their products are safe?" I'm assuming not. Are they going to be subject to the same outright ban? Is Juul just a test balloon for further bans, or is it being made an example of? The FDA is known for regulatory capture, is it just an issue of money? Weird stuff.
>The US managed to lower the smoking and all tobacco rate dramatically among new smokers. ECigs reversed this course.
Again, you are conflating ECigs with tobacco. ECigs are a tobacco replacement and one of the things that greatly contributed to reduction in tobacco use (like Nicorette). According to this, tobacco use hasn't reversed anything, so you are definitely incorrect there:
The percentage of adults who had ever used an e-cigarette (57.3%) and the percentage of adults who were current e-cigarette users (25.2%) was highest among former cigarette smokers who quit within the past year
57.3% of adults who have ever vaped is not negligible. Seems like your conclusions are based on incorrect assumptions.
So based on that, if 25.2% of the adult population are ex-smokers, and a good chunk of those are vaping Juul, you're gonna have between 0 and 25.2% of the population who aren't smoking now to be smoking again by banning Juul. This action, if allowed to stand, will certainly reverse the current tobacco rate trend, potentially to the 1970s adult smoking rate of ~37%.
But aren't there dozens of other companies that sell the same product? Nicotine vape pens? Why is this calling out Juul specifically, and not all nicotine vape pens?
I think it would be a net win for society if the whole concept were killed, or regulated/marketed to help long-time smokers kick their habit. Nobody needs this stuff, even if you enjoy it.
Like alcohol? Sports cars? Cars that can go faster than the fastest speed limit? Large houses? International travel? Where precisely would you like to draw that arbitrary line? Are there any things you do that aren't required to "live" but you "enjoy?"
The point of Juul and similar vaping products is they are a way to get people off cigarettes, which are significantly more harmful. Banning Juul and similar products will only increase smoking rates. I'm not sure why the government wants to increase smoking rates, but there is certainly financial incentive to do so based on the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.
>The point of Juul and similar vaping products is they are a way to get people off cigarettes,
The point of Juul is to make money, sure you can use it to stop smoking cigarettes but there are also people starting vaping without ever having smoked cigarettes.
>The point of Juul is to make money, sure you can use it to stop smoking cigarettes but there are also people starting vaping without ever having smoked cigarettes.
Yes if you only look at it from the company's earnings perspective, but the benefit to the market/society is undoubtedly to get people off cigarettes, and it has worked better as a substitute than anything before it. This is undeniable regardless of how demonized vaping has become in the US.
It's a very simple equation: allow Juul and get more people off cigarettes. Ban Juul and increase smoking rates. It's amazing how obtuse people (and the government) are on the subject.
> It's a very simple equation: allow Juul and get more people off cigarettes. Ban Juul and increase smoking rates. It's amazing how obtuse people (and the government) are on the subject.
I am actually not so sure about this. Cigarettes smoking rates have been falling consistently for many years, youth smoking rates were up in the 90's but fell before vaping / e-cigarettes hit the market.
Smokers also since 1980 have been smoking less cigarettes per day.
There is a significant amount of high school students that starts with e-cigarettes, and doesn't use them to quit anything else. Statistics don't seem to indicate that these children would have smoked cigarettes if they wouldn't have access to e-cigarettes. One also could argue that this potentially makes cigarette adoption higher for this population, because they are already used to nicotine and smoking/vaping.
All in all, it's not as simple as you make it out to be.
Drugs and vaccines must have sufficient evidence that they are safe before being released to the public. If you want to know more about how they go about doing this, just read some of those studies.
> I can prove it is dangerous with studies, but to prove it isn't dangerous seems like an impossible task.
You don't see that you run the same damn studies but get a negative effect? You can even do it solely off p-value (but instead should do a more complex calculation based on the harms discovered, etc.)
If your "is it dangerous" study shows it is with p < 0.05 = dangerous, p > 0.10 = safe, 0.05 <= p <= 0.10 = more study needed.
This decision is hard to justify on the basis of scientific evidence of harm. Despite the tobacco industry's decades-long effort to deny the link between lung cancer and smoking tobacco, it seems well-understood that the combustion product benzo[alpha]pyrene plays a major role. This is one of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (5 rings in this case) which, after being processed by lung cytochrome p450 enzymes, will form mutagenic DNA adducts. Adducts that form in regions of the genome that control the cell life cycle can result in cancers, particularly if defects exist in normal DNA repair mechanisms. For example:
Some of the enzymatic activity resulting in conversion of PAHs to activated PAHs capable of binding to DNA appears to be promoted by nicotine and inhibited by THC, curiously enough, i.e. the cannabis-vs-tobacco smoke issue:
However, there's no benzo[a]pyrene or similar PAHs generated via vaping, it's just nicotine in an aerosolizable liquid (propylene glycol + glycerine) which doesn't seem to have any medical negatives. Juul also includes benzoic acid as a preservative to avoid microbial growth, however, which is something I'd avoid inhaling personally.
Nicotine is indeed a highly addictive substance, but there seems to be no scientific reason to allow smoking plain tobacco while banning vaporized nicotine. I'd suggest removing the benzoic acid, which would of course shorten shelf life and perhaps require refrigeration, if anything.
I agree with you...it's the additional factors that appear to be more muta/carcinogenic than the nicotine itself. Granted (as you said) nicotine isn't ideal.
The amount of sugar and its related health effects IMO completely outweigh the impacts of nicotine.
The large food corps are finding ways to make sugary food more addictive so you have populations of sugar addicts starting at a very early age...the entire picture is so very distorted.
I'm honestly not sure at this point why Juul is on the chopping block. I'm a college student, and Juul took off during my sophomore year of high school. They absolutely marketed to teenagers and created a dangerous product, but they're no longer the biggest player in the game.
By my senior year of high school, most kids had moved on to disposable vapes. From what I know, they're about the same price, you don't have to worry about recharging them (and having a teacher/parent ask you about your "usb stick"), and have the same number of hits
Juul should absolutely be fined/etc for marketing to children and starting the vaping epidemic in high schools, but the FDA is years too late on that front
Juul was especially targeted by the FDA as Juul's advertising and marketing was specifically targeting the younger crowd. There are other products on the market that are similar to Juul (i.e., RJ Reynolds vape products), but the marketing appears to be different in tone than Juul.
On another note but relevant, there is an interesting conversation that is yet to be had with the Supreme Courts recent ruling on the EPAs overreach of executive power...the same argument could be made with the FDA.
People have consumed Tobacco (I assume in the search of Nicotine) for centuries. There is obviously some human enjoyment and satisfaction in doing so. Transitioning from more harmful smoking to less harmful 'smoking' is good. Letting people choose unhealthy things to enjoy is good (assuming a decent risk calculation). The antivape movement seems so weird amongst the general social themes in the US to open up weed and in more fringe cases decriminalize more drugs.
It seems like FDA overreach. I mean I get that we don't want teens to get hooked on a bad habit, but.... sugar is marketed like crazy to toddlers, kids, teens etc. in a much more aggressive way and is by far more harmful in the long run.
I don't vape anymore, but it was fun and passed the time. I'd much rather see FDA approved vape formulas than random suppliers with who knows what inside them.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadI think if people went at this with rational minds:
* Discover side effects (via actual science, not the "vaping is melting your brains" commercials on TV)
* List them on the box
* Let people decide
(I'm not aware of the current situation in the US btw, just know that it's perfectly possible to get a booster in the NL)
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...
But now that the data is in, though, when your option is two vaccines, one with very minor risk, and one with even less risk, and they are both equally effective, it's obvious that you should prefer the latter.
1: The Moderna vaccine is separate from Pfizer/Biontech even if they share technological base.
2: Moderna was discontinued for younger people (below 30yos) in at least some European countries due to slightly higher risk of myocarditis (even if the Pfizer vaccine had slightly lower efficiancy).
Seems like both vaccines are allowed for smaller children in the US now. Over here they put the cutoff for the vaccine at 12-13yos iirc (my older kid got it but not my younger one).
The FDA is allowed by law to regulate vapes. The Supreme Court ruled that the FDA wasn't allowed to regulate tobacco. Congress fixed the SC's complaint and since then the FDA has been moving slowly to prevent another (harder to overcome) legal issue from the SC or to lead to prohibition.
That's why the FDA is suddenly proposing rules limiting nicotine and menthol flavoring in cigarettes.
What it really comes down to is not equal protection under the law, it's big tobacco wants Juul gone.
This is nonsensical. "Big tobacco" owns Juul. And couching the shutting down of a company addicting kids to nicotine in terms of equal protection is.. bleh.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/19/business/altria-juul/index.ht...
Idealistically only. In reality, expect a lot of societal problems if that happens. Crime increases from black market good and increase assaults from smokers who have had their drug removed. Basically drug war 2.0. Unfortunately most people vote idealistically these days and tend to ignore or not even think about the reality of implementing laws/bans. Even after seeing the horrible effects of drug wars, people still love fighting them.
Seems like an example of tyranny of the majority.
> it seems like the current plan is to just try to prevent new users and let the current users smoke until they die (or help them quit if they choose to).
>The second part of the comment you replied to addresses this.
It attempts to address it, but in banning of Juul products, which many ex-smokers used and continue to use to get and stay off cigarettes, is very obviously counterproductive to this assumed objective. Banning Juul will create more cigarette smokers, both ex-smokers and kids who decide to pick up the habit. Full stop.
In the short term. In the long term cigarette adoption was falling to under 5% in high-school/college kids. Juul reversed the trend and the majority started using nicotine. If we lose 7 years of people getting addicted, we can save the next 21.
Plus, it's not eCigs that are being banned. It's Juul. They're the ones who cannot prove their additives are safe. They could change their juice to make it have less toxic additives.
You're conflating two things: cigarettes and nicotine. With a lot of propaganda, repressive sin taxes, and the development of substitutes; the US managed to lower the cigarette smoking rate since the 60s. Why do you think these techniques are even still relevant and will work the same on nicotine substitutes? That seems to be what you are using to support the ban.
Also, this is a "for the children," argument.
>Plus, it's not eCigs that are being banned. It's Juul.
Ya that's the weird thing. The shelves are filled with competitors, have they all "proven their products are safe?" I'm assuming not. Are they going to be subject to the same outright ban? Is Juul just a test balloon for further bans, or is it being made an example of? The FDA is known for regulatory capture, is it just an issue of money? Weird stuff.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/28/4956945...
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-regulat...
The development of alternatives had nothing to do with new smokers (kinda obviously). The advertising and taxes did, of course.
"For the children" doesn't make sense as a fallacy here. It's children that vape. Some adults switched to vaping, but that number is negligible.
> have they all "proven their products are safe?"
The FDA approved 23 eCig systems using the same methodology that they used to not approve Juul.
> is it just an issue of money
Juul is owned by Phillip Morris. Other eCig brands owned by other big-tobacco are among the 23 approved.
It's not weird. It's a first-mover who cut corners and their competitors didn't.
Again, you are conflating ECigs with tobacco. ECigs are a tobacco replacement and one of the things that greatly contributed to reduction in tobacco use (like Nicorette). According to this, tobacco use hasn't reversed anything, so you are definitely incorrect there:
https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco...
>It's children that vape. Some adults switched to vaping, but that number is negligible.
Wrong here too.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db365.htm
The percentage of adults who had ever used an e-cigarette (57.3%) and the percentage of adults who were current e-cigarette users (25.2%) was highest among former cigarette smokers who quit within the past year
57.3% of adults who have ever vaped is not negligible. Seems like your conclusions are based on incorrect assumptions.
So based on that, if 25.2% of the adult population are ex-smokers, and a good chunk of those are vaping Juul, you're gonna have between 0 and 25.2% of the population who aren't smoking now to be smoking again by banning Juul. This action, if allowed to stand, will certainly reverse the current tobacco rate trend, potentially to the 1970s adult smoking rate of ~37%.
I think it would be a net win for society if the whole concept were killed, or regulated/marketed to help long-time smokers kick their habit. Nobody needs this stuff, even if you enjoy it.
Like alcohol? Sports cars? Cars that can go faster than the fastest speed limit? Large houses? International travel? Where precisely would you like to draw that arbitrary line? Are there any things you do that aren't required to "live" but you "enjoy?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
The point of Juul is to make money, sure you can use it to stop smoking cigarettes but there are also people starting vaping without ever having smoked cigarettes.
Yes if you only look at it from the company's earnings perspective, but the benefit to the market/society is undoubtedly to get people off cigarettes, and it has worked better as a substitute than anything before it. This is undeniable regardless of how demonized vaping has become in the US.
It's a very simple equation: allow Juul and get more people off cigarettes. Ban Juul and increase smoking rates. It's amazing how obtuse people (and the government) are on the subject.
I am actually not so sure about this. Cigarettes smoking rates have been falling consistently for many years, youth smoking rates were up in the 90's but fell before vaping / e-cigarettes hit the market.
Smokers also since 1980 have been smoking less cigarettes per day.
There is a significant amount of high school students that starts with e-cigarettes, and doesn't use them to quit anything else. Statistics don't seem to indicate that these children would have smoked cigarettes if they wouldn't have access to e-cigarettes. One also could argue that this potentially makes cigarette adoption higher for this population, because they are already used to nicotine and smoking/vaping.
All in all, it's not as simple as you make it out to be.
https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco...
You don't see that you run the same damn studies but get a negative effect? You can even do it solely off p-value (but instead should do a more complex calculation based on the harms discovered, etc.)
If your "is it dangerous" study shows it is with p < 0.05 = dangerous, p > 0.10 = safe, 0.05 <= p <= 0.10 = more study needed.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3268909/
Some of the enzymatic activity resulting in conversion of PAHs to activated PAHs capable of binding to DNA appears to be promoted by nicotine and inhibited by THC, curiously enough, i.e. the cannabis-vs-tobacco smoke issue:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1277837/
However, there's no benzo[a]pyrene or similar PAHs generated via vaping, it's just nicotine in an aerosolizable liquid (propylene glycol + glycerine) which doesn't seem to have any medical negatives. Juul also includes benzoic acid as a preservative to avoid microbial growth, however, which is something I'd avoid inhaling personally.
Nicotine is indeed a highly addictive substance, but there seems to be no scientific reason to allow smoking plain tobacco while banning vaporized nicotine. I'd suggest removing the benzoic acid, which would of course shorten shelf life and perhaps require refrigeration, if anything.
The amount of sugar and its related health effects IMO completely outweigh the impacts of nicotine.
The large food corps are finding ways to make sugary food more addictive so you have populations of sugar addicts starting at a very early age...the entire picture is so very distorted.
By my senior year of high school, most kids had moved on to disposable vapes. From what I know, they're about the same price, you don't have to worry about recharging them (and having a teacher/parent ask you about your "usb stick"), and have the same number of hits
Juul should absolutely be fined/etc for marketing to children and starting the vaping epidemic in high schools, but the FDA is years too late on that front
On another note but relevant, there is an interesting conversation that is yet to be had with the Supreme Courts recent ruling on the EPAs overreach of executive power...the same argument could be made with the FDA.
I don't vape anymore, but it was fun and passed the time. I'd much rather see FDA approved vape formulas than random suppliers with who knows what inside them.