Wanted: billion dollar foundation to challenge global health industry lies
Monday, February 10, 2020 at 16:24 Last week Clive Bates, former director of ASH and now a leading advocate of reduced risk products, tweeted:
Idea: somehow find a billion dollar foundation to set up a system to meticulously track and challenge the false and misleading statements of WHO, CDC, Bloomberg-funded proxies, and call out the junk science and press releases of influential academics and medical society chancers.
I would be surprised if Clive’s reference to a ‘billion dollar foundation’ was entirely innocent.
He didn’t elaborate though and none of the people who subsequently commented took the hint so let me spell it out.
There already exists a ‘billion dollar foundation’ that could do the work outlined by Clive (assuming his plan is to challenge the scaremongering about e-cigarettes and other reduced risk products).
It’s called the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World and it was launched in New York in September 2017. (I know, because I was there.)
Supporting the initiative is the tobacco giant Philip Morris International which has pledged to donate one billion dollars to the Foundation over twelve years (€83 million per year until 2029).
Announced twelve months later, in September 2018, one of the Foundation’s core projects is the Smoke-Free Index which has recently and very quietly been renamed the Tobacco Transformation Index.
(Frankly, I’m not surprised. Given the nature of the project, calling it the ‘Smoke-Free Index’ was an obvious hostage to fortune and I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought so.)
According to the Foundation’s website:
The Tobacco Transformation Index will provide quantifiable evidence over time of what steps the largest tobacco companies are taking toward achieving a world free of combustible cigarettes and other high-risk tobacco products and any actions they take to impede that progress.
This resource will evaluate 15 of the largest tobacco companies in the world. Previously known as the Smoke-Free Index, the Tobacco Transformation Index is the first action of the Foundation’s Industry Transformation initiative, a core strategy of the Foundation’s overall mission to achieve a smoke-free world within this generation.
When I first wrote about the project (Was that it? Smoke-Free Index fails to ignite) I made the point that:
I do wonder what PMI’s competitors think of the company funding a body that intends to hold their feet to the fire, forever monitoring their activities in the name of some ‘smoke-free’ utopia.
I wonder too if by committing a billion dollars to the Foundation, PMI has created an albatross that could seriously embarrass both the company and its investors in the years ahead.
For example, if their public statements are anything to go by, senior PMI executives clearly think their company is leading the race towards a ‘better’, smoke-free future.
They boast that they are disrupting not just the industry but their own company.
But what happens if and when PMI lags behind some of its rivals? (Talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words.)
Will the Foundation’s Smoke-Free Index point the finger at the company that is bankrolling it?
We’ll find out in September when the first Tobacco Transformation Index is scheduled to be published, two years after the project was announced.
In the meantime I urge the Foundation to take up Clive Bates’ idea and set up a sister project that, in his words, would ‘meticulously track and challenge the false and misleading statements of WHO, CDC, Bloomberg-funded proxies, and call out the junk science and press releases of influential academics and medical society chancers.’
They won’t, of course, because the Foundation is desperate to win the approval of the very organisations it should be calling out for their lies and disinformation.
So instead of taking on the real obstacles to change and transformation it prefers to focus on 15 tobacco companies, many of them direct commercial rivals to their sole funder.
The reality is that however hard the Foundation tries to win the blessing of its detractors within the global health industry, it will never be accepted by WHO, Bloomberg and co because of that pesky link with PMI.
Anyway, I can’t wait to see how PMI fares when the first Tobacco Transformation Index is published by the Foundation in September.
My guess is that the company will be near the top of the transformation table - if indeed there is a table - but will they dare place PMI in first place?
Even if it’s merited by scrupulously impartial third party analysis, the cynics will have a field day.
There is of course another issue that needs to be addressed and it’s this.
When Clive Bates talks of the need for a ‘billion dollar foundation to set up a system to meticulously track and challenge the false and misleading statements of WHO, CDC, Bloomberg-funded proxies, and call out the junk science and press releases of influential academics and medical society chancers’, he is obviously talking about a project that will combat the disinformation on e-cigarettes and other risk reduction products.
But what about the many false and misleading statements about combustible tobacco, or the junk science on second and even third-hand (sic) smoke?
The truth is, while e-cigarettes, heated tobacco and snus may pose a significantly smaller risk than combustibles, some of the arguments used to denormalise smoking - and smokers - are equally open to question and examination.
Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to concern many anti-smoking, pro-vaping campaigners because they’re as keen on a smoke-free world as any public health professional and the end justifies the means.
Adults who enjoy smoking and don’t want to quit are unimportant. If they can be persuaded (or forced) to stop smoking, because it’s ‘good’ for them, it doesn’t matter whether it’s by fair means or foul.
I get that on current evidence smoking combustible tobacco poses a much greater risk than vaping regulated e-cigarettes, but that doesn’t excuse some of the wilfully exaggerated claims about the risks of smoking.
Whether it’s smoking or vaping, all false and misleading statements should be challenged.
Those of us with memories longer than the last decade will never forget the lies and fear-mongering that preceded workplace smoking bans, graphic health warnings, plain packaging and the rest.
Excuse, therefore, any sense of schadenfreude when I hear the same people who promoted the ‘quit or die’ mantra, or helped create an unfounded fear of ‘secondhand’ smoke, complain when similar tactics are used to undermine reduced risk products.
They say you reap what you sow and this is a classic example. The health risks of smoking and vaping may be light years apart but having used junk science to denormalise smoking in public places and stigmatise the consumer don’t whinge when a product you support is targeted by the same public health organisations you were once happy to endorse.
The war on smoking set a precedent for future public health campaigns and vaping advocates in tobacco control will just have to face the consequences of the template they created and are responsible for.
Update: Charles Gardner, who I understand works for the Foundation, tweets:
Holding big tobacco's feet to the fire is just as important as holding public officials and octagenarian philanthropists to account for misinformation.
That’s all very well but I see little evidence that the Foundation is doing anything to address the latter. Is there a report or project I’m unaware of?
Reader Comments (3)
“But what about the many false and misleading statements about combustible tobacco, or the junk science on second and even third-hand (sic) smoke?”
It’s precisely because it was the “false and misleading statements” and “junk science” about tobacco that got the ball rolling on over-hyped health “dangers” of all number of other things that a genuine multi-billion dollar foundation of this type will never, ever be allowed to exist. Because as the first and biggest example of Junk Science Personified, any multi-billion dollar establishment with the genuine intention of uncovering junk science, hype and biased propaganda presented as valid research would have to start there. If they didn’t then they’d be nothing more than a multi-billion dollar sham as big as the multi-billion dollar sham that is Tobacco Control, and people would rapidly come to regard them with the same bored disinterest as, these days, they regard all the finger-wagging Healthists who infest society. Because the lies, exaggerated risks and whipped-up hysteria around smoking are, still, far greater than any thought up since – even the current Coronavirus scare (and, in my view, it is just yet another scare. It’s flu, for goodness sake – it comes round every winter!), pales into insignificance by comparison to the overblown claims made by “researchers” in the pay of the anti-smoking league, particularly in the final push for smoking bans. Even the Coronavirus hasn’t yet been accused of being able to pass through solid walls like cigarette smoke has!
What a shame. An overhaul of our scientific community is well overdue, with epidemiological figures and statistics being clearly delineated from real, laboratory-based and peer-reviewed science, and with research centres heavily funded from or commissioned by vested interests being named and shamed and their published “results” being minutely scrutinised using established scientific protocol as a benchmark – and any “results” found to be wanting in any area being publicly denounced as the obedient droning of so-called scientists with greater interest on the next batch of grant money than on doing any real, impartial scientific research. As a well-known blogger with a longstanding scientific background has often stated, one of his erstwhile professors said long ago that science was no longer interested in pursuing the truth – it was now all about pursuing funding. And that’s the real root of the problem which would need to be exposed by any truly genuine multi-billion dollar institution.
So, sorry Clive – but it probably won’t happen for those very reasons.
Clive Bates is a hypocrite as one who backed all the junk from those organisations knowing the purpose was not to protect others from smokers but to bully and stigmatise smokers for his shared vision of a smoke free world.
I personally cannot think of anything more boring than a sterile world full of hypochondriac hysterics and I wonder how the club that Clive is a member of gets to decide andxthen enforce it on people who profoundly disagree with their fascist vision of the future.
Smoking is, after all, healthier than fascism.
As for PMI - who cares. One smokerphobic organisation is much like another. You cannot put a fag paper between their various hate campaigns designed to bully smokers to quit.
Tobacco control's political power is based upon lies, manipulated data, and relentless propaganda. The negative effects of smoking have been exaggerated and the effects of second hand smoke are spurious. The lies must be exposed. I doubt this initiative will right these historical wrongs or even consider the hate campaigns that they relied upon to persecute smokers in their quest for power and profit.