Researchers are calling for balanced perceptions so that vaping becomes less visible and less appealing to children while ensuring it remains an effective and accessible quitting aid for adults who smoke. This comes after a major review found public understanding about vaping has plummeted dramatically over the past decade, reports The Guardian.
Research has found that at least half of all adult smokers in Britain wrongly believe vaping is as harmful or more harmful than cigarettes, making them less likely to switch to vapes and quit the deadly habit.
Evidence from scientific studies shows that while vaping is not risk-free, it is far less harmful than smoking tobacco, which produces thousands of chemicals, including toxic metals, poisonous gases and substances that cause cancer.
“It’s worrying that public perceptions of vaping are now so far out of step with the evidence,” said Hazel Cheeseman, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).
One reason for the trend is widespread media coverage of studies finding potential risks from vaping without mentioning the substantial harms associated with smoking, she noted.
“For smokers, these misconceptions have real consequences. If someone believes vaping is as harmful as smoking, they’re less likely to use it to quit smoking and more likely to stop vaping and return to cigarettes. Both of those outcomes are far worse for their health,” Cheeseman added.
A major review into vaping by King’s College London found that e-cigarettes posed a fraction of the risk of tobacco smoking, with vapers significantly less exposed to harmful substances.
ASH commissioned YouGov to collect data for their 2026 Smokefree GB survey of more than 13 000 adults, weighted to be representative of the population, and according to the analysis, 54% of UK adults and 52% of smokers believe vaping is as harmful or more harmful than smoking, a figure that rises to 61% among smokers who have never tried vaping.
Fewer than a third of smokers correctly believed that vaping was less harmful than smoking.
Death by cigarettes
A decade ago, only a quarter of UK adults thought vapes were as harmful as, or more harmful than, cigarettes. Strikingly, among people who named a strategy to quit vaping, nearly a fifth used cigarettes, the survey found.
“It’s a depressing state of affairs,” said Prof Jamie Brown, Director of the UCL Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group. “Two out of three smokers will die from a smoking-related illness if they don’t quit, so it’s a really urgent public health issue. We know that e-cigarettes are a very effective way for helping smokers to stop, so it’s important for them to have these misperceptions corrected.”
Brown said the reasons for the misperceptions were hard to unpick, but noted that scores of scientific studies had reported potential health risks of vapes without comparing them with the risks from smoking. Such studies are often widely reported in the media.
“The upshot is that people have seen a lot of news stories over the past 10 to 15 years that focus on the harms of e-cigarettes without putting them in the context of how bad cigarettes are,” he said.
Prof Peter Hajek, Director of the Health and Lifestyle Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London, said false beliefs about vapes discouraged smokers from making the switch and “closed the door to a relatively easy way out of the deadly habit”.
He said some anti-smoking advocates seemed to have an unethical belief that exaggerating the harms of vapes was justified because it served a good cause.
Ministers are implementing new restrictions on vaping products and preparing further regulation through the Tobacco and Vapes Bill.
Alizée Froguel, Prevention Policy Manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “There is no good evidence that vaping causes cancer.
“Evidence so far shows that legal vapes are far less harmful than cigarettes and other tobacco products, and they have been proven to be an effective stop smoking tool. But as we don’t know their long-term impact, they can’t be considered risk-free and they shouldn’t be used by children and people who have never smoked.
“It’s right that the UK government is taking action to reduce the appeal and availability of vapes to young people, alongside protecting them from the devastating harms of tobacco. At the same time, it’s important to ensure that vapes are accessible to the millions of people who still smoke in the UK and need support to quit.”
Cheeseman said a much more coherent public health strategy was needed to reduce youth vaping while ensuring that adult smokers know the health benefits of switching to vapes.
Growing vape use
The ASH data show that daily vaping among adults has overtaken daily smoking in Britain for the first time, with 3.3m vape users saying they are ex-smokers. At the same time more than 1m 11-17 year olds say they have tried vaping.
Both the success of vaping as a quit aid and the urgent need to reduce youth uptake are highlighted in the data, which reveal that around 5.5m adults (10%) currently vape. At the same time, the proportion of adults who smoke daily has fallen to 6.6%, down from 9.7% in 2020, while daily vaping has risen from 4.5% to 7.8% over the same period.
This marks a momentous shift in how Britons consume nicotine; the result of smokers switching to vaping as a less harmful alternative or quitting aid.
An estimated 3.3m people, around 60% of current vapers, are ex-smokers, while 32% are dual users of tobacco and vapes and 8% have never smoked. Among those who gave up smoking in the past five years, more than half (58%) say they used a vape to quit, representing around 2.5m successful quitters.
While youth vaping has not increased in the last year, exposure to vape marketing remains widespread. Three-quarters (75%) of young people report seeing vape promotion, most commonly in shops (50%) and online (29%), particularly on social media platforms including TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
Cheeseman said the task now was to get the balance right: to make vaping less visible and less appealing to children while ensuring it remains an effective and accessible quitting aid for adults who smoke.
“If we get that balance wrong, we risk slowing progress on reducing smoking, which remains the leading cause of preventable death."
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Major independent evidence review: vaping ‘a small fraction’ of the risk of smoking
Vaping causes ‘much less’ DNA damage in cells than cigarettes – Imperial research
Nicotine vaping linked to lung cancer – Australian analysis
Cherry-picking of vaping research is reminiscent of tobacco industry days