NOTICE | WHO uses Big Tobacco’s playbook to trick smokers around the world | Op-Ed
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Tobacco control activists like to point to a 1969 internal memo from the defunct Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation that offered a strategy to counter the growing wealth of evidence linking smoking to disease. Their plan was simple, they would strive to mislead the public, with the memo urging employees to use doubt as “the means to establish controversy”.
Half a century later, we now see the World Health Organization (WHO) using the same practices as the so-called “Big Tobacco Playbook” as the organization sows doubt and confusion to deliberately mislead mislead smokers about the relative risk of vaping products. compared to tobacco.
On May 25, the WHO updated its Q&A page on e-cigarettes. The information they provide is a model of linguistic obfuscation and trickery that would make any 1960s tobacco executive proud.
The document asks the question if “electronic cigarettes [are] more or less dangerous than conventional tobacco cigarettes? The answer to that is simply that they are much less dangerous. No credible academic would claim otherwise, except to debate the exact level of harm reduction. However, the WHO cannot bring itself to admit this indisputable truth.
Instead, the World Health Agency uses 173 words to sidestep the issue and cast doubt on a very simple fact. They imply a false equivalence by saying that tobacco products and e-cigarettes “pose health risks.” They then discuss a “range of factors” that can influence the risk, none of which are significant enough to negate the overwhelming evidence that vaping is orders of magnitude less harmful than smoking. Rather than answering the question they asked themselves, they use bluster and chicanery to avoid telling the truth.
Elsewhere in the Q&A, the WHO questions whether vaping products help people quit smoking. The WHO states that “the evidence for the use of [e-cigarettes] because a cessation aid is inconclusive”, although there are now around 82 million vapers worldwide, almost all of whom were former smokers. The document also implies that secondary steam is dangerous to bystanders when no evidence exists to that effect; evidence that regulated vaping of nicotine was responsible for lung damage in the United States when it was proven to have been caused by illicit THC cartridges; and grossly exaggerates the potential drawbacks of vaping without admitting that they could be a life-saving alternative to smoking for millions of people around the world.
This is shameful behavior on the part of the WHO, as they know full well that vaping products are not at all comparable to combustible tobacco. The WHO’s anti-vaping ideology has led to a situation in which the organization seems to have abandoned any pretense of caring about the health of the world’s smokers.
The tobacco industry’s “merchants of doubt” of the 1960s and 1970s are squarely and rightly condemned for the deception that led millions to continue smoking despite emerging evidence of harm. The actions of the WHO are arguably worse than that. Health and medical organizations have far more clout and respectability than the tobacco industry, but this highly irresponsible disinformation campaign by the WHO will be quoted around the world to the detriment of public health on every continent. The WHO makes a big deal that industry has misinformed the public in the past, but how is the misinformation in the WHO’s Q&A less damaging when it can only lead fewer smokers trying reduced-risk products and potentially quitting as a result?
Even anti-vaping public health activists must be quietly embarrassed by the duplicity of the WHO guidelines. The organization treats the health of taxpayers who fund it with contempt in favor of an ideological and political distaste for the industry, and in doing so ironically protects the cigarette trade it claims to oppose.
By deliberately promoting a strategy of manufactured controversy over vaping products, the WHO is selling doubt on a scale not seen since the 1970s and should be condemned at least as harshly as we condemned Big Tobacco’s deception 50 years ago. year.
Martin Cullip is an international member of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.