There's a big puffy cloud of smoke hanging over the vaping versus cigarettes debate this week. 

It's all kicked off because the government's handing out free vapes to smokers to stop them getting what we know could be a death sentence. 

They've done a deal to buy a bunch of them for $500,000.

Between last January and July, 3000 were given vaping kits and nearly half of them stopped smoking. 

Which, ordinarily, you would think would be a good news story. 

Not so for Kelly Burrowes, Auckland University Vaping Researcher.

She said on Newstalk ZB that it wasn't. 

So I spoke yesterday to Robert Beaglehole. Yes, the Robert Beaglehole.

Former boss of the World Health Organisation. Public health expert. 

He says some of the searches are from laboratory-based scientist with no epidemiological or public health experience and doesn't have the big picture in mind. He says one of the other antagonists to this approach clearly doesn't comprehend the evidence, because it's a mystery to why someone would oppose something that is much less harmful and cheaper. 

It feels a bit to me like the Covid days when you had so-called experts piping up about the harms of a disease without taking a helicopter view of the best way a society should manage such risk for the least-overall harm. 

There's a political element to this, too. Because we know there are certain politicians desperate to paint Casey Costello as some sort of big vape lobbyist in drag. 

The choice, really, if you'd call it that, seems to come down to the devil we know and devil we don't.