Why do official figures show a 40% drop in a year in number of young US vapers?

New figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that there are currently around 2m vapers among US students – a big drop compared with last year, when the figure was 3.6m. However, the agency attributes this not to a massive decrease in vaping but to a change in the way the survey was carried out.

According to the 2021 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), 11.2% of high school students (1.72m) and 2.8% of middle school students (320,000) are current e-cigarette users. Overall, 7.6% of students in the US are vapers.