The following content is sponsored by Preserving American Freedoms.
President Joe Biden has always had a blind spot for the Chinese threat. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” he once said. “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks.”
Well, those “not bad folks” are currently flooding the U.S. with illegal disposable flavored vapes marketed directly to children as the Biden-Harris Food and Drug Administration (FDA) looks the other way.
According to a bombshell report from The Associated Press, “the number of different electronic cigarette devices sold in the U.S. has nearly tripled to over 9,000 since 2020, driven almost entirely by a wave of unauthorized disposable vapes from China.”
This explosive growth in illegal Chinese nicotine trafficking is a testimony to the fecklessness and incompetence of the FDA, an agency that in 2018 labelled youth vaping an “epidemic,” and by 2020 banned almost all flavored e-cigarettes.
These policy changes allowed Chinese companies to corner the global market on disposable flavored vapes containing synthetic nicotine. More alarming, as former Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Tom Price has written, “reports suggest these Chinese manufacturers are also boosting these disposable vapes with illegal levels of nicotine to increase addiction levels among our children.”
According to the most recent National Youth Tobacco Survey, roughly 2.5 million American youth use e-cigarettes, and 85 percent of them use “banned” flavored products. It is estimated that 90 percent of these vaping products originate in China. According to a report, Chinese nicotine traffickers use social media platforms like TikTok to “sway teens to take up vaping.” #ElfBar, a hashtag promoting the popular Chinese-made disposable vape company that sells flavors like Rainbow Cotton Candy, has over 2.1 billion views on TikTok alone.
The significant majority of these bad actors operate completely unimpeded by the Biden-Harris FDA. The harshest penalties received to date have been sternly worded warning letters from the agency. Little wonder that a recent investigation showed that banned Chinese vapes are available for sale right next door to the FDA’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. This gross lack of enforcement raises serious doubts about the FDA’s commitment to protecting public health and its transparency in addressing this issue.
The Reagan-Udall Foundation, an independent non-profit, issued a scathing report condemning the FDA’s failure to stem the tidal wave of illicit products, writing that, “the Agency has not been transparent regarding the reasons it has failed to clear the market of illegal products, or even whether its policy preference is to do so, contributing to stakeholder frustration and, in some situations, additional litigation.”
The Biden-Harris administration doesn’t appear to be too concerned with China’s vape invasion of the U.S., but you can help STOP it.
ACT NOW by contacting your member of Congress today and tell them to STOP the flow of illegal vapes from China.
