Imagine if every food on the market had to pay a million dollars to get certified.
If the FDA wanted to run a generic study on whether vaping was safe, I would applaud it. Even if it charged ten million dollars across the entire industry to fund that study, that would be fine. But making every manufacturer go through an independent highly-expensive process is a product of regulatory capture, not to keep anyone safe.
I find it quite a stretch to lump vaping in with food. The FDA regulates food and drugs. And yes, drug makers do have to pay a strong price to get certified. It incombs to the the drug maker to run toxicology tests, not the FDA. The latter just enforces the conformity of those tests to its standards.
In general, vaping fluid is a couple basic ingredients plus flavors. The basic ingredients should go through drug-level safety testing if they haven't already gone through it. But each recipe on top of that? Very similar to new food recipes.
Or similar to drug combos, which must be certified as such.
Even if the individual drugs have their own certification, mixing them and packaging them together requires a new certification. Now of course, the new cert will rely heavily on the existing docs, so it's not like everything has to be re-proved again, but the interaction & effects thereof are scrutinized a bit more heavily.
It's not mixing and matching drugs. It's taking one single drug and adding flavors. The inactive ingredients do not need the same scrutiny as active ones.
That is "a" process. Another process is widespread usage and observing the result - there has been widespread use for 5+ years (and even further back on a smaller scale) by people who often smoked 20 to 30 years before switching, and I would challenge you to find any evidence suggesting there is a health risk.
Of course this is assuming that the goal of the FDA is to genuinely protect consumers.
