E-cig pioneer Oliver Kershaw: Vaping industry is very close to political ‘checkmate’

by Matt Rowland September 29, 2018

During a Washington, DC, event this week hosted by Axios, FDA Chief Scott Gottlieb made some rather starting revelations about the possible future of the American vaping industry. In addition to considering new regulatory requirements that might theoretically ban both the online and brick-and-mortar the sales of all flavored e-liquids, Gottlieb now states that his agency might further ban all online sales of vaping products. Period.

After labeling teen usage of Juul and other e-cigs as a national epidemic earlier in the month, Gottlieb has been on a mainstream media tour that includes Fox News, CNBC’s Squawk Box, and almost any news outlet that will have him. His main point of contention is that teen vaping is surging to astronomic levels, yet he never seems to provide any scientific data to back up his claims.

"It’s now clear to me, that in closing the on-ramp to kids, we’re going to have to narrow the off-ramp for adults who want to migrate off combustible tobacco and onto e-cigs."

- FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, September 25 at the Axios-hosted event on vaping

The fact that Gottlieb never seems to provide proof of a teenage vaping epidemic has not gone unnoticed by one of the vaping industry’s very first and most vocal advocates. When Mr. Oliver Kershaw - founder of the E-Cigarette-Forum.com - learned of Gottlieb’s initial threats of a possible ban on flavored e-liquids, he took to Facebook to express his outrage. He also suggested that the end for the American vaping industry may be close at-hand in the form of a political “checkmate.”

“Gottlieb is revealing to us the ethical position of the FDA. The health of existing smokers is to be sacrificed to prevent teen use of nicotine. There is no health agenda here to speak of. Lung cancer = nicotine use. The FDA is totally in thrall to the temperance league and is utterly neglecting its public health duty but, astonishingly, circumstances have been engineered such that this abstinence-only agenda is the one that is ‘politically impeccable’.

This is far worse than when FDA tried to ban vaping in 2008. Why? Because it has fiat control now: I see little in the way of recourse. I also can't see how Gottlieb backs out of this position. How does he save face, given he's asking the impossible?

We're close to check-mate here. There's only one solution - Unity and aggression.”

Related Article: Related Article: Squawk Box Alert: Is Gottlieb implementing a vaping flavor ban in 60 days?

Only five days after posting these comments on Facebook, the Axios-hosted event on vaping regulations and vaper’s rights took place in Washington, DC, and the future of vaping took another sharp turn to the negative. When Gottieb announced the possibility of a total Internet-wide ban on the sales of all vaping products including vape mods, tanks, coils, and other complements, his statement shook the vaping community to its very core. Is Kershaw’s theories about an impending vaping checkmate actually coming true but at a much faster rate than even he predicted?

Regulator Watch interviews vaping pioneer Oliver Kershaw

Brett Stafford of Regulator Watch appears to have been watching the same Axios event hosted televised via C-Span 2 on September 25. An interview with the infamous vaping pioneer Kershaw soon followed and is now posted online as of September 28. One of the more startling accusations by Kershaw involves the notoriously anti-vaping organization The Campaign for Tobacco Fee Kids.

“I hate to say it, but we have this incredible publishing bias which is funded by (the) FDA which essentially funnels tremendous amount so money into these ‘research centers’ that are all fundamentally designed to find problems with tobacco products and not designed to find opportunities from so-called tobacco products (vaping devices and e-cigs).

And so, we end up with the minimal risk blown out of proportion. At the center of this, you have these curious organizations like the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids whose role, actually, in the trajectory of American policy on tobacco, has never been properly scrutinized…is full of serious questions over what they’ve engineered, and takes absolutely phenomenal amounts of money from people like Mike Greenberg…(who) cannot understand the first thing about what’s going on here.”

Mike Bloomberg is the 8^th wealthiest person in the United States and the 11^th richest person in the world. He has engaged in many philanthropic endeavors over the years. He is also a Democrat. In addition to funding several anti-vaping organizations like the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, Bloomberg is also staunchly in favor of abortion rights, gun control, saving the environmental, and immigration rights.

In the Regulator Watch video, Mr. Kershaw seems to be suggesting that with absolutely zero academic or professional credentials in the field of nicotine research, Bloomberg is not equipped to make an informed decision about the perceived dangers of teen or adult vaping. Bloomberg appears to be simply transferring the known health risks associated with smoking to that of the vaping industry without regard to published scientific fact to the contrary.

Unfortunately, Kershaw alleges that these anti-vaping organizations are only far too happy to take the ill-informed Bloomberg’s billions of philanthropic dollars and use them to fund FDA-endorsed negative marketing strategies. In short, Mr. Bloomberg is a witting or unwitting pawn– albeit a very rich one – in the fight to eradicate the vaping industry in favor of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma.

(Image courtesy of YouTube/ eCig Europe)

E-cig pioneer Oliver Kershaw: Vaping industry is very close to political ‘checkmate’

Regulator Watch interviews vaping pioneer Oliver Kershaw

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