Did Philip Morris International use the e-cigarette, or vaping, product use associated lung injury (EVALI) outbreak to market IQOS heated tobacco?

25 July 2021 will mark the second anniversary1 of the e-cigarette, or vaping, product use associated lung injury (EVALI) outbreak.2 The concerns raised and news media attention focused on EVALI created a fertile environment for the tobacco industry to promote their e-cigarette alternatives,1 3 but this has not been studied.\n\nOne such product is Philip Morris International’s (PMI) heated tobacco product: ‘IQOS’.4 5 To assess how PMI promoted IQOS in the news during EVALI, we used ‘Tobacco Watcher’ (www.tobaccowatcher.org), a fully automated and publicly available tobacco media analysis engine that warehouses news from more than 500 000+ sources. We plotted trends in news stories mentioning ‘IQOS’ finding the largest number of stories mentioning IQOS occurred on 25 September 2019, with 261 articles, more than double the next highest day previously recorded.\n\nWhile investigating this anomaly we discovered an official PMI press release entitled ‘Lung illnesses associated with use of vaping products in the US’ was published the same day.6 In the release (see online supplemental material), PMI recounted the EVALI outbreak beginning: ‘Skepticism and fear around vaping has emerged following the cases of respiratory illness and deaths in the US associated with the use of e-cigarettes.’ PMI then contrasted this against their IQOS heated tobacco product, writing ‘on April 30 2019, the FDA authorized IQOS for sale in the US, finding that marketing of the product would be ‘appropriate for the protection of public health’’ (quotes used in the original release).### Supplementary data\n\n[tobaccocontrol-2021-056661supp001.pdf]\n\nAccording to Tobacco Watcher, the original PMI press release was republished (including …