Have I got an exclusive for you

Well, this is a rum do.

If you read my Recycling old 'news' post yesterday you'll know that the Sunday Mirror published a short but 'exclusive' report that began:

At least a million Brits quit smoking during lockdowns. It is the most in a year since the 2007 smoking ban, University College London research shows.

I wasn't aware of any new research, only a survey conducted by YouGov, analysed by ASH/UCL, and published by ASH last July that controversially claimed that 'A million people have stopped smoking since the COVID pandemic hit Britain'.

The headline figure, based on the first lockdown, attracted a lot of headlines despite the fact that even some of our top tobacco control experts seemed a bit dubious.

I'm used to anti-smoking stories being recycled so in the absence of evidence of new research, I assumed the Sunday Mirror was rehashing an old and discredited story.

To check, I emailed Nigel Nelson who wrote the piece and, to be fair, he replied.

According to Britain’s longest-serving political editor, yesterday's 'one million' headline figure referred to the first lockdown “which is why [the report] begins with ‘at least’, and that is made clear again further down in the story.”

I’m not sure it is that clear, to be honest. After all, if you’re claiming an ‘exclusive’ surely the headline figure should be based on new research, not information and analysis that is almost a year old.

This is where it gets interesting or murky, depending on your point of view.

According to Nigel, the 'exclusive' nature of the story refers to new figures that ASH have compiled ‘from research completed in February’ but the newspaper report was of necessity so short they weren't used. 

This, he explained, was due to Prince Philip dominating the news pages which is understandable up to a point but it doesn't explain why a longer, more detailed version of his report – which he implied had been cut – could not have been posted online, which is not uncommon.

Anyway, what the new figures apparently show is that of the ‘four in ten [smokers] who tried to quit during the pandemic, one in seven succeeded - three times more than before Covid’.

I'm truly hopeless with figures but by my estimation, even if these new figures are correct, the number of smokers who have successfully quit during Covid is 400,000 not a million.

I base this on the fact that in 2019 there were approximately seven million smokers in the UK and 40 per cent of seven million is 2.8 million, and one seventh of 2.8 million is 400,000.

Or have I got this wrong?

Either way the new figures were ‘compiled differently so [are] not entirely comparable’ with those published last year.

Doh!

They are however so robust the Sunday Mirror chose not to use them and fell back on last year's headline figure that was pretty dubious even then.

Even ASH seem to lack confidence in the new figures.

Last year’s research was given the five star treatment - including national and regional press releases, each one posted on the group's website - and it paid off handsomely.

This time whatever new research was completed by February appears to be so underwhelming that not only did the Sunday Mirror choose not to mention the figures, I can’t find any mention of the research on ASH’s website.

They still got their ‘one million’ headline, though, and the Sunday Mirror got an 'exclusive'. So, in that sense, job done.