Why my sympathy for Quit for Covid volunteers is strictly limited
Saturday, May 23, 2020 at 11:00 Louise Ross, one of two volunteers managing the Quit for Covid Twitter account, has tweeted:
I’ve pondered all day whether to bother with this but I will. Why do I help run the @QuitforCovid messaging (on a voluntary basis I might add)? Because I may have then done something to help a few people not find themselves gasping for breath in ICU. It’s a small contribution.
Louise’s tweet followed criticism of the Quit for Covid campaign here, on Chris Snowdon's blog, and on social media. I am guessing the two are related. Perhaps she feels a bit hurt that her efforts are not universally appreciated.
To be clear, I applaud anyone who offers their time and energy to help those that genuinely seek help. If however she is looking for sympathy because the broader ambitions of the Quit for Covid campaign are being questioned, she should look closer to home.
It wasn’t me, Chris Snowdon or anyone else commenting on social media that put the campaign in the public eye. It was ASH. They were the ones who went to the Guardian this week and complained about the 'unreasonable delay' in the government's funding of the Quit for Covid initiative.
As soon as ASH's application was public knowledge it was inevitable that people would query the use of £350,000 of taxpayers’ money on a campaign that, on the evidence of the last nine weeks, has failed to generate any traction with the people it purports to help.
Instead it's become a lame echo chamber for a tobacco control industry that already has enough money pumped into it to tackle smoking. Why does it need a further injection of taxpayers' money?
The fact that the application for additional funds came from ASH, a group already in receipt of an annual government grant of £140,000 and whose sense of entitlement is off the scale, merely added fuel to the fire.
To be clear, I’m aware of Louise’s background and I respect the work she did as a professional smoking cessation worker and her tireless advocacy of risk reduction products.
She comes across as a knowledgeable and empathetic stop smoking advisor and I can see why she is popular in public health and vaping advocacy circles.
Unfortunately, by getting involved with ASH and the Quit for Covid campaign, Louise has crossed the line from ‘smoking cessation for those who want to quit’ to a more coercive agenda.
Take, for example, this Quit for Covid tweet which (typos aside) makes the broader strategy very clear:
There are six strands and our approach and are based on ● stopping the promotion of tobacco; ● making tobacco less affordable; ● effective regulation of tobacco products; ● helping tobacco users to quit; ● reducing exposure to second-hand smoke; ● effective communications
I suspect this tweet reflects the grant application ASH submitted to the Department of Health and if so I'm not surprised Number 10 is taking its time weighing it up.
Perhaps, like me, officials suspect the Quit for Covid campaign is an opportunistic grab for public money when the public health industry, including the Department of Health, should be fully focussed on tackling a genuine public health crisis, not launching mass media campaigns urging people to quit smoking, or campaigning to make 'tobacco less affordable' at a time when many smokers may have been furloughed or become unemployed through no fault of their own and find smoking a comfort during this difficult period.
I’m sorry, Louise, but if you hang out with ASH and sign up to their bullying, prohibitionist agenda, don’t be surprised if you get caught in the crossfire.
Reader Comments (4)
Louise is just another tobacco controller and when she says things like this "Because I may have then done something to help a few people not find themselves gasping for breath in ICU." she cannot understand why some smokers find it offensive, patronising, and usually used in a derogatory way to make smokers feel bad about themselves while demonstrating the superioriority complex of such people who think smokers are stupid for not wanting the help of these saints.
For a start it is not a foregone conclusion that this happens to smokers as we know dose makes poison and many other factors can lead to being in such need of ICU. However when like Louise you want to push your product of choice on others after being born again through vaping, Hallelujah, you just can't see how or why this patronising attitude is so unwelcome.
Quit for Covid is another bullying organisation that claims to only want to help smokers while working to punish them for smoking as clearly stated by its end game such as "making tobacco less affordable" Sorry, Louise, but wtf right do you have to control my purse strings and demand I pay more for my product just because I have no intentions of quitting or vaping. I tried that crap and it almost blew my lungs out so I do not take kindly to it being described as some miracle product. In decades to come the potential harm from vaping will be known but like me, you won't be around to see the results but whatever your beliefs, it is wrong however well meaning to force people to quit or vape because you don't like what they do. If smokers genuinely want help to quit they know exactly where to go. Quit for Covid is just tobacco controllers jumping on the bandwagon in hope to make a few quid out of it with the added bonus of making the general public fear smokers that bit more. Crikey - I've even see a council use the quit for Covid logo while pushing that smokers are more likely to die from covid and more likely to cause other people to die from it via passive smoking. That is a lie and so does nothing but promote hatred and fear of smokers.
If you get into bed with the bullies and greedy thugs in tobacco control you immediately turn smokers away from anything you are involved with. That's why the irrelevant quit for covid is going nowhere even if it is a nice little earner for you and your chum if that £350,000 comes your way.
Perhaps we smokers are not as stupid as you think we are.
I did feel a little sorry for them after reading all those tweets waiting to save all those smokers who never came.
But people who smoke read the newspapers too and are well aware how few smokers appear in the statistics.
To give up their apparent advantage would be madness until the matter is resolved.
Quit for Covid may not know that long before there was such a thing as a Tobacco Company, Tobacco came to this country as the most marvellous medicine from the New World having been used for centuries to cure many things.
Just because modern Prohibitionists and their activists don't like it and have been taught to fear it , doesn't mean it has no benefits at all.
You are not fighting Big Tobacco, you are attacking the public.
I know that Antitobacco allow themselves an attrition rate of 50% for their cessation drugs and persistent meddling.
"Smoking kills one in two of its users."1
But that's not what Richard Doll said.
1 Doll R, Peto R, Boreham J and Sutherland I. Mortality in relation to smoking: 50 years' observations on male British doctors.
"Among the men born around 1920, prolonged cigarette smoking from early adult life tripled age specific mortality rates, but cessation at age 50 halved the hazard, and cessation at age 30 avoided almost all of it."
https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-3-health-effects/3-28-health-benefits-of-smoking-
Covid -19 is too serious a subject to mess about with and finding the cure might save their own lives.
I feel no sympathy for someone that volunteers to persecute others in the name of health. The only real result is a totalitarian obliteration of liberty resulting in total control. C.S. Lewis called these efforts the'Compulsory re-education of the ideologically unfit.'