It’s World No Tobacco Day and we have sent our detailed letter and multiple critical expert comments to the WHO Director-General. The covering note and links to relevant documents are reproduced below. I hope it causes them to pause and reflect. My guess is that Tedros has been very badly advised here.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
Director-General
World Health Organisation
Avenue Appia 20
1202 Geneva
Switzerland31 May 2021
Dear Dr Adhanom Ghebreyesus
WHO must urgently reassess its tobacco & nicotine policy and stop causing harm
We write to express our grave concern about the direction the World Health Organisation is taking on tobacco and nicotine policy.
WHO’s outright opposition to products that are, beyond any reasonable doubt, much lower risk than cigarettes (vaping, heated tobacco products, snus, oral nicotine etc) makes no sense in terms of science, public health or ethics.
WHO support for the prohibition of these low-risk products is wholly counter-productive and has the obviously perverse effect of protecting the cigarette trade, promoting smoking and increasing disease and death. How can WHO justify banning much safer alternatives to smoking while leaving cigarettes easily available everywhere? Yet, India’s Health Minister has just received a WHO award for doing exactly this, with an endorsement by you personally. The main beneficiary will be India’s dominant cigarette company, ITC Limited.
WHO’s press release for World No Tobacco Day (31 May) is a perfect illustration of an international agency losing control of its scientific objectivity and its focus on reducing disease. We attach a detailed 14-page critique of this press release written by us, all longstanding independent public health policy experts with no conflicts of interest. We hope our critique prompts a complete rethink. This is a time when WHO should be building public trust, not giving its critics further justification.
We are not the only specialists concerned by WHO’s bizarre stance, I attach a collection of statements from the independent expert community expressing deep concern about WHO’s approach and in support of the use of harm reduction as a tobacco policy, including from highly respected former WHO directors.
These products need to be understood as part of a harm-reduction strategy and integral to meeting the Sustainable Development Goal target (3.4) to reduce cancer, respiratory cardiovascular and other non-communicable diseases. They are an opportunity, not a threat. It is time for WHO to catch up with the last 15 years of innovation and embrace tobacco harm reduction.
More discussion of these issues is available here: WHO has gone rogue on tobacco policy – millions at risk from tired dogma and a refusal to grasp innovation.
We hope you will reflect on this communication and provide a substantive response.
Yours sincerely
Professor David B. Abrams PhD
Department of Social and Behavioral Science
NYU School of Global Public Health
New York University.
United StatesClive D. Bates MSc
Director,
Counterfactual
London,
United KingdomProfessor Raymond S. Niaura PhD
Department of Social and Behavioral Science
NYU School of Global Public Health
New York University.
United StatesDavid T. Sweanor JD
Adjunct Professor of Law
Chair of the Advisory Board of the Centre for
Health Law, Policy and Ethics
University of Ottawa, CanadaCC:
Dr Zsuzsanna Jakab, Deputy Director-General
Dr Catharina Boehme, Chef de Cabinet
Dr Ranieri Guerra, Assistant Director-General for Strategic Initiatives
Dr Princess Nothemba Simelela, Assistant Director-General, Special Advisor to the Director-General, Strategic Priorities
Ms Jane Ellison Executive Director for External Relations
Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist
Dr Samira Asma Assistant Director-General, for Data, Analytics and Delivery
It won’t change a thing. When people are driven by ideology instead of rational thought, all the cogent argumentation you can muster will be completely ignored.
Witness Sweden where the death rate among drug addicts is the highest in Europe. The Swedish government’s attitude towards drugs is driven purely by ideology and the bodies of those who are killed by Sweden’s ideology are just collateral damage on the way to utopia.
The WHO and the anti-vaping clowns are driven by ideology and by definition they are immune to having their opinions changed by rational argumentation or hard facts.
The only way to change things is to get them to change their ideology and that’s a remarkably tall order.
We’ll see who prevails, Science or Bloomberg’s millions $$. I hope it’s not the latter.
“We’ll see who prevails, Science or Bloomberg’s millions $$.”
Heh, millions don’t do all that much. It’s the MSA’s HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS EVERY SINGLE YEAR for over 20 years that have brought us to where we are today, largely based in the encouragement of hatred of smokers and anything related to them… fertilized by brain worms of fear of secondary, tertiary, and even quadrinary smoke.
Tolerating the lies aimed at smokers has created a world that’s difficult to control, with the power resting in the hands of fanatics who are perfectly willing to write anything and everything off as collateral damage in pursuit of their Holy Grail.
Fear, propaganda, and lies are diseases, and I’m afraid we’ve spent far too long tolerating them to easily control them now, but time will tell I guess.
– MJM
Thanks for all that you do!
in canada we can buy snus made with tobacco, but tobacco free snus from sweden is banned by health canada. what is the logic in this insanity?