The main point: The cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults fell below 10% for the first time in recorded history in 2024.

But: Reports of this did not come from the U.S. government, which had collected the data, but rather from an analysis in NEJM Evidence.

Why it’s important: Typically, the U.S. government is responsible for analyzing national survey data on tobacco use and publishing the results. But federal cuts decimated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Office on Smoking and Health (OSH), leaving others at companies and universities filling in gaps.

By the numbers: The new 2024 data came from the National Health Interview Survey, which is conducted annually by CDC.

Any tobacco product: 18.8% of U.S. adults (48 million) use at least one tobacco product.
Cigarettes: 9.9% of U.S. adults (25 million) reported smoking cigarettes in 2024, down from 10.8% in 2023. Rates were higher among those whose education stopped before college, people with disabilities, and people in rural areas.
E-cigarettes: Use of e-cigarettes remained unchanged from the previous year at 7%.
Smokeless tobacco: 2.6% of adults used smokeless tobacco, including nicotine pouches.

The details:

CDC released the data last fall, but without the analysis that usually accompanies it and gets published in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
The researcher who analyzed the data first submitted a draft of the report to MMWR. But he was told that MMWR could no longer publish work from external contributors related to smoking because the agency did not have smoking experts available to review it, as OSH was effectively shut down.
The analysis was published as a “public health alert” in NEJM Evidence, an initiative created last year by the New England Journal of Medicine and the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota as an alternative to MMWR.

Next steps: A similar effort is underway to analyze the results from the National Youth Tobacco Use Survey, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released the raw data results this month without any accompanying analysis.