Now would be a good time for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Surgeon General – two entities entrusted to give the public credible health information – to make corrective statements, according to a story by Sally Satel and Guy Bentley published by the American Enterprise Institute.
Both agencies, the authors say, have committed public health malpractice by trying to scare people who can’t or won’t give up smoking while withholding or distorting data about viable alternatives.
Satel and Bentley said that major US tobacco companies, such as Altria and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, had unveiled ‘primetime television commercials and full-page ads’ in more than 40 newspapers telling US citizens something they already knew: Smoking kills.
‘One ad says, “Altria, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard, and Philip Morris USA intentionally designed cigarettes to make them more addictive”,’ they pointed out.
‘Another reads: “More people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol, combined”.
‘The companies were ordered to make these “corrective statements” as the result of a 1999 lawsuit the Justice Department filed over the industry’s decades-long misleading statements about the effects of smoking.
‘They are a long-overdue correction by an industry that long tried to suppress the truth about the lethal effects of smoking…’
The authors then go on to argue that the net of truth should be cast more widely.
The story is at: https://www.aei.org/publication/feds-owe-the-public-corrective-statements-on-vaping/.