Smoking rates are at a historic low. You're not hearing about it from the CDC

The cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults fell below 10% for the first time in recorded history in 2024. That's a big deal in itself. Also remarkable is how everyone is finding out about it. Reports of the historic dip in smoking didn't come from the U.S. government, which had collected the data. Instead, the news came via an analysis in the digital journal NEJM Evidence by Israel Agaku, the founder and CEO of research technology company Chisquares. Typically, the U.S. government is responsible for analyzing national survey data on tobacco use and publishing the results. But federal cuts that decimated the Office of Smoking and Health at the CDC mean that Agaku, and others like him at companies and universities, are now working to fill in a range of gaps left by the government. Agaku's analysis, for example, was published as a 'public health alert' in NEJM Evidence — an initiative created late last year by the New England Journal of Medicine and the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota as an alternative to the CDC's weekly publication. CIDRAP also launched the Vaccine Integrity Project in April last year with a mission to protect vaccine use amid government efforts to weaken policy on immunizations.