With weeks to go in his tenure, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb squared off with two companies at the center of his efforts to halt a surge in teen vaping.
Gottlieb, who plans to leave his post on April 5, said at an event in Washington that he had a contentious meeting last week with executives from Marlboro maker Altria Group Inc and Juul Labs Inc.
Late last year, Altria took a US$12.8 billion stake in Juul, maker of a popular vaping device, at the same time that the companies had promised to increase efforts to keep kids from getting hooked on e-cigarettes.
Photo:AFP
Miffed by the transaction, Gottlieb had summoned the companies to Washington to provide answers.
“The e-cigarette industry has been overly dismissive” of the risk that kids could become addicted to nicotine through e-cigarette use, Gottlieb said on Tuesday at the Brookings Institution. “We’re capturing an exploding epidemic right now.”
The FDA chief raised the possibility of temporarily pulling pod-based nicotine products off the market if youth vaping numbers continue to rise substantially.
Sales could resume if manufacturers can show that their devices are geared toward adult cigarette smokers trying to quit, and not kids.
“It was a difficult meeting,” the commissioner said, adding that there was a “disconnect” between the companies’ priorities and those of health officials.
He added that it appeared Altria’s decision to purchase a stake in Juul was purely a business decision and not driven by public health concerns.
Shares of Altria fell 2.2 percent to US$56.01 in New York on Tuesday, the biggest drop since January.
Altria and Juul did not specifically respond to Gottlieb’s characterization of the meeting.
Both companies said they remain committed to combating underage use of e-cigarettes.
“The FDA is going to have to very carefully calculate its action against the entire category of pod-based products,” Gottlieb said.
If the vaping products are pulled from the market, the FDA could allow the companies to resume selling them after a review, he said.
The agency is working on defining exactly what constitutes a pod-based product in case it needs to take such action, he added.
Gottlieb also said the FDA’s proposed rule to cut nicotine in cigarettes to non-addictive levels would likely be ready for review by the administration of US President Donald Trump this summer.
Doing so could cause about 5 million adult smokers to quit smoking in the first year of adoption, the FDA has previously reported.
Separately, San Francisco officials on Tuesday proposed legislation that would ban the sale of e-cigarettes in the city and prohibit companies like Juul from occupying city-owned property, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The FDA last week released a draft guideline on its much-anticipated plan to limit the sales of most flavored e-cigarettes.
The proposal calls for enhancing enforcement against flavored e-cigarette sales in retail locations where a minor can enter at any time, such as a convenience store or gas station.
The restrictions would not apply to tobacco, mint or menthol-flavored e-cigarettes.
Gotlieb, who has taken heat from senators and industry leaders over a plan to ban menthol cigarettes, declined to comment specifically on next steps for the initiative following his departure.
However, he did say he thinks the long-term goal is to remove “characterizing flavors” from all tobacco products.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
TRANSITION: With the closure, the company would reorganize its Taiwanese unit to a sales and service-focused model, Bridgestone said Bridgestone Corp yesterday announced it would cease manufacturing operations at its tire plant in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口), affecting more than 500 workers. Bridgestone Taiwan Co (台灣普利司通) said in a statement that the decision was based on the Tokyo-based tire maker’s adjustments to its global operational strategy and long-term market development considerations. The Taiwanese unit would be reorganized as part of the closure, effective yesterday, and all related production activities would be concluded, the statement said. Under the plan, Bridgestone would continue to deepen its presence in the Taiwanese market, while transitioning to a sales and service-focused business model, it added. The Hsinchu
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has approved a capital budget of US$31.28 billion for production expansion to meet long-term development needs during the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. The company’s board meeting yesterday approved the capital appropriation plan for purposes such as the installation of advanced technology capacity and fab construction, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. At an earnings conference last month, TSMC forecast that its capital expenditure for this year would be at the higher end of the US$52 billion to US$56 billion range it forecast in January in response to robust demand for 5G, AI and
RSS