Press conference in Q4 of 2026: the launch of the MOVE website and the publication of our commissioned research. Media only. Event details
Press conference in Q4 of 2026: the launch of the MOVE website and the publication of our commissioned research. Media only. Event details
Learn Health questions
Written by MOVE. Last reviewed 23 October 2026. Every claim below names its source, and where the science is contested, we say so.
If you smoke and you have tried to stop, you already know the hard part, and it is usually not willpower. The question here is a narrow one: for people who will not quit nicotine, does switching to vaping get them off cigarettes?
The Cochrane Library keeps a living review, "Electronic cigarettes for smoking cessation", updated as new trials appear. In the version published on 26 August 2026, with evidence current to 1 January 2026, Cochrane reports high-certainty evidence that nicotine e-cigarettes help more people stop smoking than traditional nicotine replacement therapy, the gums and patches most people try first.
"High-certainty" is Cochrane's own grading, and Cochrane does not award it lightly. It means more research is unlikely to change the direction of the finding.
You have probably seen the number. Public Health England's 2015 review, "E-cigarettes: an evidence update", estimated vaping to be around 95% less harmful than smoking. We quote it too, and we quote the objection to it.
Thomas Eissenberg and colleagues, in an American Journal of Public Health editorial in 2020, argue that the 95% figure lacks a solid evidence base, and understanding of vaping's harms has moved on in the decade since. Both things are true at once.
In 2016 the Royal College of Physicians' report, "Nicotine without smoke: tobacco harm reduction", found e-cigarettes less harmful than combustible tobacco, and that the hazard from long-term inhalation of vapour from the e-cigarettes then available "is unlikely to exceed 5% of the harm from smoking tobacco". The College returned to the question in April 2024 in a separately titled review, "E-cigarettes and harm reduction: an evidence review", which concluded that e-cigarettes remain an important tool to alleviate the burden of tobacco use, and called for measures to reduce their appeal, availability and affordability to people who do not smoke, including children and young people.
We do not tell anyone to start. We publish what the research says, with every source named, and adults decide for themselves.
In September 2022 the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities published "Nicotine vaping in England: 2022 evidence update", a review led by McNeill and colleagues that weighs vaping prevalence and harms in one document.
We have very little local research, so we cite these foreign reviews as foreign reviews, and not as a picture of Malaysian smokers.
We used to cite a 2021 meta-analysis here for the claim that losing a legal supply makes relapse more likely, and we had the paper backwards. It measured the opposite exposure: former smokers who used e-cigarettes had about twice the risk of relapsing to cigarettes compared with former smokers who did not. We are saying so here rather than deleting the claim without a word, and the paper is now in our library among the sources that argue against us.
We have not found a study that measures the question our argument is about: what happens to people who are currently vaping when a legal supply is withdrawn. Until we find one, we say so, and we do not put another source in its place. The corrected entry, with the figures.
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