# Vapers, Twitter and COVID



## fbb1964 (15/1/21)

https://www.planetofthevapes.co.uk/news/health-studies/2021-01-13_vapers-twitter-and-covid.html

*Vapers, Twitter and COVID*
Posted 13th January 2021 by Dave Cross





Public conversation about the viral pandemic has recently been rivalled by a debate over the role of social media in modern society. What better time for a trio of researchers to drop their study about vapers on Twitter discussing the evidence surrounding vaping and developing severe Covid-19 symptoms.
The study is published by JMIR Public Health and Surveillance journal, which describes itself as: “_A multidisciplinary journal that focuses on public health and technology, public health informatics, mass media campaigns, surveillance, participatory epidemiology, and innovation in public health practice and research_”.

Authors Yankun Gao, Zidian Xie, and Dongmei Li work at the Department of Clinical & Translational Research at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Despite noting that there is a strikingly low number of current smokers and vapers presenting as COVID-19 patients with severe symptoms at hospitals around the world, the trio claim: “_Electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) users might be more vulnerable to COVID-19 infection and could develop more severe symptoms_.”

That statement isn’t grounded in fact, hence the would-could-should nature of the comment, they rely on statistical manipulation of hard data.

“_It is important to characterize how e-cigarette users perceive the COVID-19 pandemic and how their perception differs from that of non-users_,” they write. “_Understanding the attitudes of e-cigarette users toward the COVID-19 pandemic and topics discussed by them on Twitter could help public health workers and policymakers take appropriate actions such as encouraging e-cigarette users to quit vaping during the current COVID-19 pandemic_.”


Laying out their bias with a statement that vapers are more likely to be admitted to hospital than non-vapers indicates that they are less concerned with informing public health and more interested in piggybacking on COVID-19 and conversations about Twitter censorship to promote themselves in an exercise in publicity and fund seeking.

Tweets were collected using the keywords: “e-cig,” “e-cigs,” “Ecig,” “Ecigs,” “electroniccigarette,” “Ecigarette,” “Ecigarettes,” “vape,” “vapers,” “vaping,” “vapes,” “e-liquid,” “ejuice,” “eliquid,” “e-juice,” “vapercon,” “vapeon,” “vapefam,” “vapenation,” and “juul”.

They were then filtered using keywords: “CORONA,” “corona,” “COVID19,” “covid19,” “covid,” “coronavirus,” “Coronavirus,” “CoronaVirus,” and “NCOV”.

The resulting collection was then cleaned of all vendor and promotional related posting: “_From the COVID-19 tweets collected, we identified 11,479,773 tweets from 2,511,659 unique Twitter users in the non-Ecig group and 4,500,248 tweets from 187,399 unique Twitter users in the Ecig group_.”

They concluded: “_The differences between Ecig and non-Ecig group users’ attitudes toward the COVID-19 pandemic indicated a good opportunity to educate e-cigarette users about the potential harms of vaping and encourage them to quit vaping during the COVID-19 pandemic_.”


Then the authors engage in pure speculation: “_One of the top topics unique to the discussion in the Ecig _[user] _group was death and virus spread. The concerns in the Ecig group about the virus spread and COVID-19–related deaths might be related to the discussions that vaping may increase the risk of severe COVID-19 infection_.”

Finally, no decent hatchet job can pass by without a spurious reference to the EVALI lung injury outbreak – despite it not being associated with vaping – even though they admit near the end of their work that, “_currently, there is a lack of evidence that e-cigarette users are more susceptible to COVID-19 infection and death_”.

Still, they can hope the missing evidence comes to light so they can justify this waste of time and resources.

Reactions: Like 2 | Informative 3


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## alex1501 (15/1/21)

You must trust the "experts".

Reactions: Winner 1 | Funny 6


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## Darius1332 (15/1/21)

Anecdotal but gf got covid and was deadly sick 3 weeks later smell and taste still buggered - she smokes. I chain vape, if I am awake I am vaping I had 2 days of weird up down fever and gg over the covid.

Reactions: Like 2


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