Author: Jacob Sullum

A federal appeals court this week sided with several companies whose applications to sell nicotine vaping products in a variety of flavors were rejected by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that the FDA’s decisions were “arbitrary and capricious” because the agency ignored marketing and age-verification plans aimed at preventing underage vaping. But as Judge Robin Rosenbaum noted in her dissent, the manufacturers’ victory probably will be short-lived, because the FDA seems dead set against allowing the sale of vaping products in flavors other than tobacco. That position is…

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is moving fast to close off what seems to be the last remaining legal option for vaping companies that want to provide the e-liquid flavors that former smokers overwhelmingly prefer. Exercising regulatory authority that Congress recently gave it, the FDA has set a May 14 deadline for seeking “premarket” approval of vaping products that deliver nicotine derived from sources other than tobacco. Companies that fail to submit applications by then, the agency warns, “will be subject to FDA enforcement.” The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022, which President Joe Biden signed into law on March 15, included a provision…

A new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supposedly shows that wearing a face mask in public places dramatically reduces your risk of catching COVID-19. The CDC summed up the results in a widely shared graphic that says wearing a cloth mask “lowered the odds of testing positive” by 56 percent, while the risk reduction was 66 percent for surgical masks and 83 percent for N95 or KN95 respirators. If you read the tiny footnotes, you will see that the result for cloth masks was not statistically significant. So even on its face, this study, which was published in the CDC’s Morbidity…

Cigarette sales in the United States rose last year for the first time in two decades, according to data published by the Federal Trade Commission this week. Although the 0.4 percent increase may be due at least partly to smokers who stocked up on cigarettes during the COVID-19 pandemic, it coincided with declines in e-cigarette use by teenagers and adults—a potential warning sign that the campaign against vaping is undermining public health by boosting cigarette consumption. In 2020, despite the increase in cigarette purchases, it looks like the percentage of adults who smoked continued a long decline that began in the 1960s. The prevalence…

Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert who has played a leading role in advising the Trump administration on COVID-19, thinks federalism has undermined America’s response to the pandemic. “The states are very often given a considerable amount of leeway in doing things the way they want to do it, as opposed to in response to federal mandates, which are relatively rarely given,” Fauci, who has directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, recently told BBC Radio 4. “What we’ve had was a considerable disparity, with states doing things differently in a nonconsistent way….There have been a lot of…