CMO targets tobacco

Chris Whitty has been Chief Medical Officer for England since October 2019.

It's fair to say he hasn't had an easy time with most of his work being devoted to tackling an infectious global disease for which the UK (and most of the world) was disastrously ill-prepared.

This was partly due to complacency (before Covid the last global pandemic was in 1918) but in hindsight – and despite warnings such as bird flu and ebola – few people took the threat seriously.

Instead the public health industry focussed exclusively it seems on non-infectious diseases, many of them associated with lifestyle choices made by informed adults.

Now that the worst of the pandemic appears to be over in the UK Whitty is returning to what he and his colleagues do best – lecturing us about lifestyle issues - and any hope that the current CMO might be different from his immediate predecessors are evaporating fast.

According to the Telegraph today, Whitty gave a lecture at Gresham College during which he said:

"Lung cancer is now the UK's number one killer in cancer. Almost one in five people will die from this.

"The reason that people like me get very concerned and upset about this cancer is it's almost entirely caused for profit. The great majority of people who die of this cancer die so that a small number of companies make profits from the people that have become addicted in young ages and then keep addicted to something which they know will kill them.

"Smoking is something that is one of the biggest causes of a very large number of diseases, of which lung cancer is only one, and the standard estimates are that over 90,000 deaths occur every year.

"So in this year and the last year it is likely that by the end of last year at least as many and probably more people will have died of smoking-related disease than of Covid. It also has a very significant impact on hospitalisation as a result."

None of this is new or even news because if Whitty did give a lecture at Gresham College yesterday (as the Sun and Mail claim) it sounds very similar to one he gave at the same college in February.

I was unaware of the latter until I read a very complimentary profile of the CMO in the Guardian in March, part of which read:

And yet Whitty is at his most devastating when he calls out wrongdoing. In a Gresham lecture on lung cancer last month, he was clear where blame lay for the most common cancer death in Britain. “This is cancer entirely for profit,” he said.

“Almost all of the people who get this cancer … have got the cancer, because an extremely wealthy, incredibly sophisticated marketing industry – the cigarette industry – has got them addicted to cigarettes at a young age and kept them addicted the rest of their lives, and then they die. This should never be a cancer blamed on individuals. This is a cancer created by industry for profit.”

I find it hard to believe it is coincidence that, weeks away from the Government announcing its new Tobacco Control Plan, the Chief Medical Officer has chosen to renew his attack on an industry that is facing, at the very least, the threat of an additional levy (that will almost certainly be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices).

The irony is that we have the pharmaceutical companies to thank for getting us out of our Covid mess and if Chris Whitty and the rest of the public health industry weren't so blinkered in their hatred of Big Tobacco and the shocking concept of "profit" they would see that the tobacco industry can play a similar role reducing the potential harm caused by smoking.

(I know, I know, some of you won't like me saying that but we have to accept that smoking is responsible for some death and disease, even if the scale of it is open to question.)

The point I am making is that attacking the tobacco companies and laying the blame for smoking-related illnesses exclusively at their door, ignoring the fact that millions of adults have made an informed choice to smoke because they enjoy it, suggests a worrying mindset.

The time to criticise the tobacco companies was several decades ago. Today, as they turn their attention to developing and selling e-cigarettes, heated tobacco and other reduced risk products, the industry should be embraced not vilified.

Of course, as I have said many times, I want the tobacco companies to continue to defend an adult's right to smoke without being demonised or discriminated against.

Nevertheless, it is perverse of Whitty to revile the very companies that will almost certainly dominate the risk reduction market for years and probably decades to come.

Unfortunately I suspect we will be stuck with the present Chief Medical Officer for some time. "Arise, Sir Chris" has a ring to it and I imagine that following the pandemic Whitty will enjoy the sort of influence most politicians would give their right arm for.

I fear that’s bad news for the tobacco companies and even worse news for adults who enjoy smoking, know the risks, and don't want to quit.

PS. I'm not sure if the Royal College of Physicians will thank the CMO. A press release issued yesterday by the RCP and embargoed until midnight began:

Smokers should be given advice and treatment to quit their habit unless they actively opt-out, according to a new report.

The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) said that while many smokers are offered help with quitting by the NHS, an opt-out system could double the uptake of the service.

It said the health service should provide “opt-out smoking cessation services to all smokers at any point of contact with the NHS”, while pregnant women should be given financial incentives to quit.

Thanks to the CMO story the RCP report has had limited coverage. Nevertheless it indicates the degree of lobbying that is going on ahead of the Government's new Tobacco Control Plan.

Expect more of this over the next few weeks.

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

Smoking can kill but harm is multi factorial and dose makes poison. As a lifelong smoker from young childhood to old granny hood, I have always believed that but this is my body, and my choice, not Chris Whitty's nor the Government. The question must be asked. Do we live in a free society or a dictatorship?

Experts who do not need political capital, such as more funding for the anti smoker industry, or more Government bullying of consumers to meet decided targets, will tell you that lung cancer rates are rising but smoking is declining and the link between smoking and lung cancer is not as strong as once was thought. so what can account for the rise? Truth is smokers do not exclusively get illnesses or cancers that non smokers don't get too but we are the only ones blamed and shamed for getting ill whereas non smokers get empathy and compassion.

The creation of health inequalities for smokers must stop. This is about dates not data. They gave their date for a world without smokers and they will manipulate figures and scaremonger about smokers and manipulate data to ensure they get it.

The bottom line is that the likes of Whitty think they own our bodies and therefore have every right to bully us out if society and to force us to live the life they choose for us.

If that is the future. I do so hope smoking kills me sooner rather than later because I do not want to live in a sterile world full of judgemental puritans wagging their finger and lecturing about every single morsel of something we put in our mouths.

What an absolutely intolerant and miserable future they are creating.