TY - JOUR T1 - Philip Morris International used the e-cigarette, or vaping, product use associated lung injury (EVALI) outbreak to market IQOS heated tobacco JF - Tobacco Control JO - Tob Control DO - 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2021-056661 SP - tobaccocontrol-2021-056661 AU - John W Ayers AU - Eric C Leas AU - Mark Dredze AU - Theodore L Caputi AU - Shu-Hong Zhu AU - Joanna E Cohen Y1 - 2021/04/16 UR - http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/early/2022/01/11/tobaccocontrol-2021-056661.abstract N2 - 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.One 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.While investigating this anomaly we discovered an official PMI public statement published on the company's media centre webpage entitled ‘Lung illnesses associated with use of vaping products in the US’ was published the previous day.6 In the statement (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 statement).Supplementary data[tobaccocontrol-2021-056661supp001.pdf]According to Tobacco Watcher, the original PMI statement … ER -