The Impact of COP9 on Vapers

 

We have discussed the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control's (FCTC) Conferences of the Parties on this blog many times. Typically, they are cursed events - by Ebola in Moscow in 2014, by air pollution in Delhi in 2016 and by Covid in the Netherlands in 2020. The Netherlands meeting was cancelled and rearranged for this year, but the decision has now been made to hold it online only.

This would be a good opportunity to broadcast it to the world, but I expect the usual extreme secrecy at this taxpayer-funded World Health Organisation (WHO) event. 

That would be a shame because the conference has never been more important to vapers. In the last eighteen months, the WHO has gone completely off the rails on this issue. At the start of the pandemic, it tweeted a series of bizarre lies and half-truths about vaping. Last month, it gave India a special award for banning the sale of e-cigarettes nationwide. 

 

I've now written a brief history of the COP meetings for the Property Rights Alliance: The Impact of COP9 on Vapers.

 

It concludes...

Governments differ on how they view tobacco harm reduction, but those which recognise its potential to lower smoking rates and save lives should make that case strongly at COP9. They should pick strong, articulate advocates as their delegates, not bureaucrats. If the WHO continues to spread misinformation about e-cigarettes and if COP9 is held in secret, they should with-draw their funding of the FCTC Secretariat. The FCTC Secretariat should be put on notice. COP9 is its last chance to mend its ways and operate as a transparent and evidence-based organisation. If it cannot be reformed, it should be disbanded.

You can download the report for free here.

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A Swift Half with Dolly Theis

In the latest episode of The Swift Half with Snowdon I spoke to Dolly Theis who is doing a PhD in 'public health'. We spoke about obesity, the nanny state and her mission to achieve gender balance in parliament. Watch below.

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Did Brits drink more under lockdown?

As the Daily Mail reports, people in the UK supposedly drank more alcohol than usual during the first lockdown...

 

Alcohol consumption fell in countries across Europe during the Covid pandemic – but not in the UK.

Across 21 European countries, the UK was the only one to see an increase in drinking, a study has found.

Researchers surveyed almost 32,000 people across Europe, including 836 in the UK, between April and July last year.

 

So the claim about the UK comes from a survey of 836 people? This doesn't sound good.

The study, such as it is, has been published in Addiction. It was not just a survey, it was an online survey that people heard about via "social media and postings on institutional websites, via press releases, or student and professional networks". This self-selecting group of people filled in the survey, presumably just once, between 24 April and 22 July 2020.

 

Based on this sliver of information, the authors conclude that there was a 10 per cent increase in alcohol consumption in the UK.

 

Of all the countries examined in our project, only the United Kingdom reported a significant mean increase in alcohol consumption. In Ireland, no statistically significant change was reported.

The problem is that we don't need to survey a few hundred people to find out how much people are drinking. We literally have the receipts. In the UK...

The total volume of alcohol sold during lockdown (the 17 weeks to 11 July 2020) fell to 1.3bn litres, down from 2bn the previous year, data from Nielsen Scantrack and the CGA found, despite value sales through the major retailers rising £1.9bn over the same period.

Sales of booze at the supermarket during the four month period hit £7.7bn, it said, however with the on-trade remaining shut, the overall volume of alcohol bought in the UK was far lower than last year, despite the increase in value.

 

Overall, according to the Euromonitor International Proprietary Alcoholic Drinks data, alcohol sales fell by 10.1% in the UK in 2020 and by 6.6% in Ireland. 

We also have the tax receipts from HMRC which show that the government received less alcohol duty revenue in April-July 2020 than in the previous year. The decline shown below actually understates the size of the drop because there was a switch from beer to wine and spirits under lockdown. A unit of beer is taxed at a lower rate than a unit of wine or spirits. The number of units sold therefore declined more sharply than the amount of tax received.

And if you're wondering whether people were just drinking all the alcohol they stockpiled before the lockdown, alcohol duty receipts in January to April were also lower than in 2019. (It should be noted that the pandemic caused some delays in tax payment, but the totals for 2019/20 and 2020/21 were no higher than 2018/19.)

This kind of evidence is pretty hard to argue against. Unless the British public were making moonshine on in industrial scale, there is absolutely no chance that they were drinking more under lockdown, or in 2020 as a whole, than they normally would. 

All the study in Addiction shows is that people in 'public health' can get any old rubbish published in a peer-reviewed journal. If this is what they are doing when their claims can be easily tested, what are they getting up to the rest of the time?

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Strange bedfellows in the moral crusade against gambling

Mary Whitehouse at the Festival of Light, 1971

 

Of all the 'anti' groups I write about, the anti-gambling coalition is the most unusual. It includes the Salvation Army, a leftwing think tank (the IPPR), a rightwing think tank (the Centre for Social Justice), problem gambling charities, the Times, the Guardian, the Evangelical Alliance, various bishops, and elements of the rival arcade, casino and pub industries.  

This loose alliance formed over the fixed odds betting terminal issue and was already in the making when the moral panic about 'super-casinos' emerged in the early 2000s. They have now got the band back together to campaign against internet gambling, as I mention in A Safer Bet. 

No one is keener on this campaign than the Guardian who yesterday reported...

 

ITV criticised for not banning gambling ads during Euro 2020

 

Did anyone expect gambling ads to be banned during Euro 2020? This is the first I've heard of it.

 

You can always tell whose side a newspaper is on by how they frame the story. For example, when the Guardian uses the headline 'Oxford college criticised for refusal to remove Cecil Rhodes statue', you know they think the statue should have been removed. If they had been against it, they would have found someone who agreed with the decision and written 'Oxford college praised for refusal to remove Cecil Rhodes statue'. If they had just wanted to report the news, they would have said 'Oxford college refuses to remove Rhodes statue'. 

 

In the case of gambling ads during Euro 2020, there is no real climate of opinion against them. In 2019, the gambling industry introduced a whistle-to-whistle voluntary ban before 9pm (foolishly in my opinion), so there are not going to be many gambling ads on TV anyway. It is a non-story, so the Guardian has tried to create a story by finding one person who is unhappy.

 

The head of the social policy group Care has written to the chairman and chief executive of ITV criticising its decision not to suspend gambling adverts during the Euro 2020 football tournament, which starts on Friday.

... In a letter, Nola Leach, the chief executive of Care (Christian Action Research and Education), called on the ITV chairman, Sir Peter Bazalgette, and the chief executive, Carolyn McCall, to forgo gambling ad revenue during the tournament.

“As the CEO of an organisation which is working to raise awareness of gambling-related harms and see them reduced through legislative action I was deeply disappointed by this response, which confirms that you do not intend to take any further action to reduce the number of adverts shown,” she said.

The news story is all about this one letter. You can find someone who will write an angry letter about anything so what is it about this organisation that makes it newsworthy? On the face of it, Christian Action Research and Education does not sound like the kind of group the Guardian normally pays much heed of.

Indeed, Care's original name was the National Festival of Light. Formed in 1971 by Malcolm Muggeridge and Mary Whitehouse, the Festival of Light was seen as a reactionary movement even at the time with its demands to 'clean up TV' and restore Christian mortality. 

 

It became the Christian Action Research and Education in 1983 and, until yesterday, only ever featured in the Guardian for lobbying against gay rights, campaigning to change abortion laws and promoting gay conversion therapy.  

It's not terribly surprising that they are also against gambling. What is more surprising is that they have found common cause with the UK's main 'liberal' newspaper on this issue, but perhaps the moral censors of the left have more in common with the moral censors of the right than they think.

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A smoke-free by 2030 - ASH's plan

ASH's All Party group put out a twelve point plan to make the UK 'smoke-free' by 2030. I looked at the proposals for Spiked...

 

ASH has made itself slightly redundant in recent years as a result of governments capitulating to its every whim. Having portrayed cigarette packaging as the one remaining way in which the tobacco industry ‘lured’ in new customers, the introduction of plain packaging in 2017 made it difficult for them to argue that people picked up the habit for any other reason than that they enjoyed it. Since then, they have resorted to moaning about smoking in reality TV shows and trying to get smoking banned outdoors.

There are two hooks for the new ASH / APPG report. First, when Theresa May was prime minister she set Britain the target of going ‘tobacco-free’ by 2030. This was barely noticed at the time. She didn’t consult anybody about it, let alone smokers, nor did she suggest how it could be achieved. But the target now hangs in the air as if it were a genuine collective commitment.

Secondly, lots of people have just died in an epidemic and ASH is keen to draw a parallel with the ‘tobacco epidemic’. The APPG report says: ‘We are taking the necessary steps to end the coronavirus pandemic; we must do the same for smoking.’ This argument is the flipside to the claim sometimes made by some lockdown ‘refuseniks’ who say that since the government has not banned smoking, it should not do anything about Covid-19. Neither argument stands up because a highly infectious, potentially fatal disease spreading through the community is a collective-action problem whereas people smoking tabs is not. It really is that simple.

ASH’s All-Party Group has a dozen recommendations which it reckons will set the course for a ‘Smokefree 2030’. Let me take you through them...

Do read it all.

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On June 21st everything must go

On a rare trip to London last week, I was struck by how the London Underground makes a mockery of the remaining coronavirus restrictions. Passenger numbers are down on pre-pandemic levels, but although people are less likely to be crammed face-to-armpit, they are still in very close proximity in a barely ventilated, confined space. I was also struck by the number of tourists getting off at Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, many of them no doubt on their way to spend a couple of hours in a windowless room watching a film or play. 

Good on them. Most adults – 28 million of us – have now had two doses of a vaccine. Another 13 million have had one jab and millions more have acquired immunity through having Covid-19. Case numbers are rising again, but they have so far not resulted in a commensurate rise in hospitalisations or deaths. With the vast majority of vulnerable people fully immunised, any third wave should be a low mortality event. Covid-19 will remain a non-trivial health issue for months, probably years, but it should no longer be a civil liberties issue. 

 

Read the rest at the Telegraph.

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Bloomberg's dark money

If you're going to write a lengthy article in a peer-reviewed journal accusing scientists of having undisclosed competing interests, it helps if you don't have undisclosed competing interests of your own. 

On Thursday, I mentioned the BMJ article which falsely claimed that studies showing smokers to be at lower risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection have been "roundly disproved" and implied that the whole thing was a tobacco industry ruse to promote nicotine. At the moment, my Rapid Response is the only one accepted for publication by the BMJ. The main target of the article - Dr Konstantinos Farsilinos - has written a response but it has not been published. 

In my reply, I noted that one of the article's two authors works for the 'The Investigative Desk', a Dutch organisation that has received money from Bath University. This is a red flag for anyone who follows the e-cigarette debate because Bath University is the home of Anna Gilmore's Tobacco Control Research Group which has received $20 million from Mike Bloomberg (it also received a gong from the WHO last week, another bad sign for vapers).

Bloomberg is the world's leading anti-vaping crusader. He openly endorses prohibition and has so far ploughed $160 million into getting e-cigarette flavours banned. Gilmore's team specialises in ad hominem arguments, portraying scientists and advocates as hired guns on the basis of tenuous, false and/or irrelevant financial links to the vaping and tobacco industries. It is a remarkably similar approach to that used by The Investigative Desk. 

The smoking/Covid studies are the hook for the BMJ article, but it is mostly an attack on tobacco harm reduction and those who advocate it. If the authors have been funded by a billionaire anti-vaping fanatic, that should be listed as a competing interest. 

A document unearthed by Dr Farsilinos suggests that Bath University is being used as a middle man in a transaction between Bloomberg and The Investigative Desk. A Supplier Form for The Investigative Desk written on Bath University headed paper states that Bloomberg is providing the money for 'the project'. 

 

 

Moreover, the contract explicitly forbids The Investigative Desk from saying that they are directly funded by Bloomberg.

 

The Contractor shall not make any statement or otherwise imply to donors, investors, media or the general public that the Foundation directly funds its activities.

Strictly speaking, they are not being directly funded by Bloomberg, but they certainly seem to be indirectly funded by Bloomberg, with the University being used to essentially launder the money. Since Bath University is listed as a funder on The Investigative Desk's website, it seems reasonable to assume that this contract was signed.

Is this kind of thing considered OK at universities? It certainly can't be considered OK at the British Medical Journal when it is publishing an article by The Investigative Desk about hidden financial ties. 

 

Some people would call this 'dark money'. The BMJ article is a pyramid of piffle regardless of who funded it, but it is an extraordinarily hypocritical pyramid of piffle if it has been covertly funded by Mike Bloomberg.

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