In response to some young people experimenting with an effective smoking cessation tool, nicotine vaping, the Obama CDC did what more social authoritarian governments frequently do - overreact in order to convince the public they solved a problem few had.
Vaping, the stupidly named e-cigarettes, were a fad and therefore some grifters did want to sell stuff to kids, no differently than grifters at Non-GMO Project sell labels for 70,000 products, at a minimum of $3,000 each, to companies who want to bilk consumers with the intelligence level of Whole Foods shoppers. Those needed to be run out of business, no question, but having the CDC declare an "epidemic", and including any young person who had even experimented with vaping in 6 months, was silly.
An epidemic should only be trotted out for serious issues, and the CDC showed during COVID-19 how incompetent government is to handle the real thing. Yet with the vaping fad basically over, government will try to claim they eliminated the epidemic that never was. Instead of it ever being an epidemic, 500,000 fewer students even bothered to experiment with it compared to recent years.
Pop culture sent vaping back to early 2010s levels, not government. People look like buffoons doing it, that is why you were only doing it (before government made it cool by freaking out) if you were trying to quit smoking. The migration from vaping to cigarettes was nothing, it was kids who would have smoked anyway doing both, and if some others did do both, that doesn't mean vaping caused it, it means harm reduction - every time someone vapes nicotine without the doesn't of cancer causing agents in cigarette smoke they are healthier. They banned flavors like menthol, for some reason Democrats claim to love Black people in America yet frequently target them with bans and higher costs, which is just annoying for users who like cherry or whatever else. It saved no one.
The CDC still has lots of other manufactured epidemics they can pretend to be working on - prediabetes, virtual pollution (PM2.5) and others just as ridiculous - and they will invent more. Yet if they really cared about public health they would modernize their bureaucracy so the next time a coronavirus pandemic occurs (and there have been three just this century already) they don't do more harm than good refusing to help states until they have the chance to lobby Congress for more funding.
