Vaping and COVID-19: Insights for Public Health and Clinical Care from Twitter.

This study describes key topics of discussions on Twitter at the intersection of vaping and COVID-19 and documents public reactions to announcements from authoritative health agencies. Twitter posts containing vaping and COVID-19-related terms were collected from 1 December 2019 to 3 May 2020 ( = 23,103 posts). Text classifiers and unsupervised machine learning were used to identify topics in posts. Predominant topics included (18.87%), (17.53%), (10.07%), (9.62%), and (7.72%), among others. Public conversations on topics, such as , , , , , and , were shaped by announcements from U.S. and international health agencies. Armed with the insights from this study, medical providers should be prepared to discuss vaping-related health risks with their patients in the era of COVID-19. Misconceptions around vaping as a protective behavior from, and an effective treatment against, COVID-19 should also be corrected.