There are reasons aplenty to think the current nominee to head the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Robert Califf, is the wrong man for the job. His coziness with Big Pharma which has lavished him with consulting fees, his official approvals on chemical abortion, and his apparent willingness to indulge any enthusiasm from the public health intelligentsia are sparking broad antipathy.
Outside the Beltway, there’s another major complaint – Califf’s obstinate, boneheaded opposition to nicotine vaping.
More than ten million Americans are vapers, by all estimates, most of them in a laudable effort to quit cigarettes. And they often succeed -- a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that nicotine vaping is more effective by far than any other smoking cessation method.
But Califf worked for the manufacturers of those other methods, prescription drugs and nicotine replacement products made by his former colleagues at firms like GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly. They aren’t crazy about the competition and Califf has been one of their most reliable zealots against the entrepreneurial vaping industry.
During his years as head of FDA’s Tobacco office, Califf variously sought to ban all flavors for vaping, aimed to “dramatically increase the campaign about the dangers of unregulated vaping,” wanted to outright ban over-the-counter vaping sales and require a doctor’s prescription for those products, and tried to require a drastic reduction of nicotine in vape products “to sub-addictive levels.”
Those measures alone threaten to strangle the vaping market. And just in the last few months, FDA has issued “market denial orders” to more than 99.9 percent of the companies applying – effectively outlawing vaping nationwide.
Let’s pause here to mention that not one anywhere has died from nicotine vaping--ever. Both the UK's public health agency and the Royal College of Physicians (not exactly corporate shills) have both declared after careful study that vaping is at least 95 percent safer than smoking cigarettes. Over there, in fact, they hand out free vapes to smokers in the hospitals to help them quit!
Cigarettes, which are approved for market by FDA, kill more than 400,000 Americans each year. And the agency chose to “permit the sale” of two more types of cigarettes just days ago.
But why should conservative senators care? Didn’t Michael Bloomberg-funded groups like Truth Initiative and Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids show us that vapers are mostly misguided weirdos hoping for a quick buzz in a rave party bathroom?
Take just a cursory scan at these testimonials (there’s tens of thousands) and you’ll quickly see that vapers are a cross-section of American life, including every political, racial, and gender demographic.
What’s more, they are passionate single-issue voters because, of course, their lives are at stake. Close analysis published by Americans for Tax Reform showed more than 96 percent of vapers polled said they were determined to vote in the next election. The wide majority said that government efforts to ban vaping would cause them to register as new voters. More than 80 percent in battleground states said they would not vote for any candidate that voiced opposition to vaping.
Senators could ask their colleague Ron Johnson from Wisconsin how that played out in the field. In 2016, Johnson was down in the polls until, in a savvy move, his campaign started visiting vape shops across the state and vowed to protect vaping as an alternative to smoking. According to CNN (which reported this with alarm), that insight mobilized thousands of new vaping voters and propelled Johnson to victory.
Here’s another worthy reason – the vaping business is driven by many thousands of entrepreneurial, hard-working Americans, mostly running small businesses that compete against global tobacco giants.
The intrepid head of the American Vapor Manufacturers Association, Amanda Wheeler, is a young working mom who built vape shops in Colorado and Arizona. Wheeler is a former smoker and cancer survivor and she says that vapers are galvanizing “for a reckoning” with FDA and their Democrat allies in Congress. “We are ordinary folks working super hard to save our own lives with our own health choices and these half-baked authoritarians like Robert Califf are trying to strip our rights and our livelihoods,” said Wheeler.
And who are her customers? “It’s every kind of adult you can imagine,” she explains. “Grandmothers, truck drivers, soldiers, moms, lefties, righties, and everywhere in between. They are livid and that outrage is aimed straight at Congress and FDA.” For a sense of that passion, watch Ms. Wheeler lay waste to FDA in this speech she gave at the Global Tobacco & Nicotine Forum in London recently.
Did Califf express any reflection or contrition on the fallout from his hardline vape policies during his confirmation hearings before the Senate in December? Nope. In fact he said he hasn’t gone far enough. Asked by Senator Tammy Baldwin if he would promise to “crack down” on synthetic nicotine (for which FDA has zero regulatory authority) Califf readily agreed. “We have to close this loophole,” he said, which means FDA will also be able to prevent any innovation in vaping technology.
The result in practice will mean that millions of Americans who have successfully quit smoking by vaping will then be corralled back into using cigarettes. Fear of that outcome is exactly what caused Democrats to drop their provision in the BBB legislation to tax vaping at huge rates. But the blowback the Democrats endured there is just a glimpse of the national potential on this issue.
If Republicans have the foresight to tap into it, an anti-regulatory approach to vaping has crushing potential. In one fell swoop the GOP could spite the national news media, show it can take FDA to the woodshed, thwart Michael Bloomberg and his paid minions at the World Health Organization, tell nanny-state activists to jump in a lake – and oh by the way help save the lives of countless voters.
Step one: throw Robert Califf out on his rear.