Vapers may be new to this, but some of us are not.
Heads Should Roll at CDC after Botched Vaping Investigation
It should have been obvious to CDC that regular e-cigarettes were not and could not have been causing these illnesses. Commercial nicotine e-cigarettes have been on the American and European markets for more than a decade and are used by tens of millions of people.
There are millions of people vaping millions of cartridges every day in America. Yet only recently did people start experiencing the symptomatic lung damage. And those people were only a tiny fraction of one percent of users.
Yet immediately I saw “health” experts jumping on the anti-vaping bandwagon with cries, of “Just stop all vaping, until we know what it is.”
I immediately knew exactly what was happening because I’ve seen it all before.
It was deliberate anti-vaping propaganda and activism, not an investigation. It was no more “botched” than the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious, aka Project Gunwalker, “accidentally” let arms slip across the southern border, justifying calls for more gun control.
The CDC did exactly the same thing with firearms, that they did with these vaping illnesses. Just as they — publicly — ignored the fact that millions of people and cartridges were involved in the “epidemic,” they pretended that all the millions of firearms and all the millions of gun owners were the “gun violence” problem.
The CDC pushed for more controls on the millions of honest folk, instead of focusing on the obvious small number of specific demographics who were committing all that violence. The CDC has always put political agendas ahead of real research.
That abuse by the CDC was what led to the 1996 Dickey Amendment, forbidding the CDC using taxpayer money on gun control activism and schemes.
Of course, the anti-rights types falsely paint the Dickey Amendment as a ban on firearms research. But it did not stop even CDC research (much less the millions in funding to other organizations). It turns out the CDC continued to study things like defensive guns uses.
They just didn’t publish when the real data didn’t support the “gun” control agenda.
I think it’s time for a more general amendment regarding the CDC’s continued political activism.