More than half of adult smokers in the UK wrongly believe that vaping is as harmful or more harmful than cigarettes, making them less likely to switch to vapes and quit the deadly habit, research has found.
Evidence from scientific studies shows that, while vaping is not risk-free, it is far less harmful than smoking tobacco, which produces thousands of chemicals, including toxic metals, poisonous gases and substances that cause cancer.
The analysis by Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) found that public understanding around vaping had plummeted in the past decade, to the point that some people have even tried to quit vaping by switching to cigarettes.
“It’s worrying that public perceptions of vaping are now so far out of step with the evidence,” said Hazel Cheeseman, the chief executive of Ash. One driver for the trend is widespread media coverage of studies that find potential risks from vaping without mentioning the substantial harms associated with smoking.
“For smokers, these misconceptions have real consequences. If someone believes vaping is as harmful as smoking, they’re less likely to use it to quit smoking and more likely to stop vaping and return to cigarettes. Both of those outcomes are far worse for their health,” Cheeseman said.
A major review into vaping by King’s College London found that e-cigarettes posed a fraction of the risk of tobacco smoking, with vapers significantly less exposed to harmful substances.
Ash commissioned YouGov to collect data for their 2026 Smokefree GB survey of more than 13,000 adults, weighted to be representative of the population. According to the analysis, 54% of UK adults and 52% of smokers believe vaping is as harmful or more harmful than smoking, a figure that rises to 61% among smokers who have never tried vaping. Fewer than a third of smokers correctly believed that vaping was less harmful than smoking.
Graph of survey responseA graph showing a majority of people believing vaping is as bad as or worse than smoking.
A decade ago, only a quarter of UK adults thought vapes were as harmful as, or more harmful than, cigarettes. Strikingly, among people who named a strategy to quit vaping, nearly a fifth used cigarettes, the survey found.
“It’s a depressing state of affairs,” said Prof Jamie Brown, director of the UCL Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group. “Two out of three smokers will die from a smoking-related illness if they don’t quit, so it’s a really urgent public health issue. We know that e-cigarettes are a really effective way for helping smokers to stop, so it’s important for them to have these misperceptions corrected.”
Brown said the reasons for the misperceptions were hard to unpick, but noted that scores of scientific studies had reported potential health risks of vapes without comparing them with the risks from smoking. Such studies are often widely reported in the media. “The upshot is that people have seen a lot of news stories over the past 10 to 15 years that focus on the harms of e-cigarettes without putting them in the context of how bad cigarettes are,” he said.
Prof Peter Hajek, director of the Health and Lifestyle Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London, said false beliefs about vapes discouraged smokers from making the switch and “closed the door to a relatively easy way out of the deadly habit”. He said some anti-smoking advocates seemed to have an unethical belief that exaggerating the harms of vapes was justified because it served a good cause.
Ministers are implementing new restrictions on vaping products and prepare further regulation through the tobacco and vapes bill.
Alizée Froguel, prevention policy manager at Cancer Research UK, said:“There is no good evidence that vaping causes cancer. Evidence so far shows that legal vapes are far less harmful than cigarettes and other tobacco products, and they have been proven to be an effective stop smoking tool. But as we don’t know their long-term impact, they can’t be considered risk-free and they shouldn’t be used by children and people who have never smoked.
“It’s right that the UK government is taking action to reduce the appeal and availability of vapes to young people, alongside protecting them from the devastating harms of tobacco. At the same time, it’s important to ensure that vapes are accessible to the millions of people who still smoke in the UK and need support to quit.”
Cheeseman said a much more coherent public health strategy was needed to reduce youth vaping while ensuring that adult smokers know the health benefits of switching to vapes.
