You raise a very important issue that all of us doing research on THR have come across. We all have “cases of scandal” in which we made our best efforts to prove that some alarmist results were obtained with methodological flaws. Yet, our efforts even if published have very little input in drafting regulatory polices. The flawed papers keep navigating the publication and regulatory systems, are still cited, are still part of the general consensus that vaping is harmful (or at least much more harmful that what was thought) expressed by media, NGOs and even the FDA, CDC and WHO.

I would add that this phenomenon is not necessarily tied to retractions. Often, there is not sufficient cause for a full retraction, since the alarmist results are just the most salient part of methodological flaws of a given paper or several papers by the same research group. Yet, the original research group and other research groups funded by same public health sources (typically NIH) keep citing the flawed results, which remain in the system and become part of the consensus.

When you criticize these flawed results, regulators and the research groups that keep citing the flawed results simply ignore your critical publication. This has created a self-sustainable self-citing literature and a consensus on harms.

There are many examples. A paper published in 2018 by researchers from Johns Hopkins (Olmedo et al) reported metal yields (nickel, lead) in the aerosol of 54 devices surpassing ATSDR safety limits. This paper has now 446 citations. Its error was a miscalculation of metal exposures. Corrected calculations showed exposure to all metals was below safety standards. This 2018 paper was criticized by Farsalinos and Rodu and myself and Soulet doi.org/10.3390/toxics1…. Our corrections have only 18 and 33 citations. Papers by the same research group and other groups funded by the NIH have systematically ignored these corrections and keep taking Olmedo et al as a benchmark reference.

I can furnish dozens of examples of flawed papers that become benchmarks that support the consensus that vaping "might be" safer than smoking but it is still "not sufficiently safe" to be a harm reduction (and then just add "young people" to the harm narrative). It is all part of a government agenda.