12 deaths from vaping, 6,300 deaths from transgender puberty-blocker drug?
There's a heckuva lot of press coverage hysteria over the dangers of vaping, with the deaths of 12 young people cited as reason to harass the companies that produce vaping products, if not legislatively ban the practice altogether. Even President Trump has joined the stampede, pressing for regulatory bans, which is not exactly good news for smokers who use vaping as a means of reducing their nicotine consumption to gradually quit smoking without making themselves sick. The latest news suggests that the vaping deaths were caused by pot contamination and perhaps Vitamin E in the compounds, rather than vaping itself, which has otherwise been safely done for years.
None of this has stopped the new wave of hysteria of coverage and calls to ban. A Google search of vaping deaths shows 256,000,000 stories. The tobacco lobby, the Left, and the mainstream media, all of which want to ban the practice, are having a field day.
Just one problem.
Based on the death stats for another topical issue, transgenderism, it's possible there's a death count that could be higher. According to the Daily Wire:
More than 6,300 adults have died from reactions to a drug that is used as a puberty blocker in gender-confused children, Food & Drug Administration data shows.
"Between 2012 and June 30 of this year, the FDA documented over 40,764 adverse reactions suffered by patients who took Leuprolide Acetate (Lupron), which is used as a hormone blocker. More than 25,500 reactions logged from 2014-2019 were considered 'serious,' including 6,370 deaths," The Christian Post reported on Thursday.
How many Google stories on that one? I counted: two.
One of them is an NBC News story that debunks quite a bit of this, probably accurately, noting that the drugs in question are often used on terminally ill prostate cancer patients, often as a palliative. Did that report say that every last one of those 6,300 deaths from users of those drugs was a cancer patient? It didn't. So we still don't know.
That leaves the question on the table about whether these drugs are safe for children identified as transgender.
Buried in the Daily Wire's report is an important detail about the use of these drugs: they aren't actually approved for children, but they are often used on them anyway.
"Lupron is being prescribed off-label for use in children who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria despite the lack of formal FDA approval for that purpose," the outlet explained.
If they're utterly harmless on completely healthy children with mental conditions, why wouldn't they be approved? The drug may be linked to use in terminal cancer contexts, but it's still not allowed on kids. And yes, there's a death count, but not a precise death count in terms of who had what before he died. NBC does not address those questions.
At a minimum, the issue ought to be investigated, with credible numbers on how many transgender kids may have had an adverse reaction, up to and including death, if for nothing else that the drug is unregulated.
Good luck with that one. The Left has put transgenderism on a pedestal, based on a misguided desire to support people with mental illnesses — by enabling their mental illnesses. So whatever that information may be, such a stat isn't going anywhere.
It just highlights how politicized medical hysteria has become. Maybe the media ought to be demanding answers on those unregulated drugs on kids instead of just hyping the vaping issue.