'Public health' groups want you to die for their dogma

It’s been encouraging to see the private sector using its money, ingenuity and supply chains to help tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Mercedes F1 has been producing breathing aids. Dyson is manufacturing 10,000 ventilators. Diageo and several e-cigarette companies have been turning their skills towards producing hand sanitiser.

Meanwhile, the lifestyle wing of ‘public health’ has never looked more out of touch and irrelevant, reduced to lying about vaping and carping about big business. Today, a bunch of them have written to the British Medical Journal demanding cigarette-style warnings on petrol. Their inability to read the room in the last few weeks has been astonishing.

According to Matt Ridley, the rot goes all the way to the top:

I'm hearing stories of private firms with virus testing kits begging to help Public Health England and being turned away with contempt until very recently, on the grounds that PHE has an aversion to anything done by the private sector. The firms don't dare say this publicly.

— Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) March 31, 2020

Last week, I mentioned the temperance group whining about Diageo’s generosity. This week it is the turn of the anti-smoking fanatics. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which is best known for getting fake news on Newsnight and nearly destroying the programme, is now being funded by uber-nanny statist Mike Bloomberg to produce articles attacking ‘Big Tobacco’. It was behind last month’s Dispatches programme about Philip Morris (PMI) and it has come up with an equally lame gotcha this week.

Philip Morris International, the world’s largest multinational tobacco company, has been accused of a “shameful publicity stunt” by a leading campaigner after it donated ventilators to the Greek government as coronavirus infections mount in the country.

One of PMI's affiliate companies donated fifty ventilators to Greek hospitals, the bastards. The 'leading campaigner' who is outraged by this is our very own Deborah Arnott of the state-funded pressure group Action on Smoking and Health:

“This is a shameful publicity stunt by Philip Morris International, which owns Papastratos and has a 40% share of the Greek tobacco market.” 

But if this is first you’ve heard about it, it’s because PMI didn’t seek publicity. As Moira Gilchrist, PMI’s refreshingly vocal vice-president explains...

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They call it a “publicity stunt”. Disingenuous & false

PMI took NO STEPS to publicize.
No Press Release
No corporate social media
No mention on website
No interviews

Our team worked hard to help their community—some commented on their own SM accounts. As is their right

— Dr. Moira Gilchrist 🧼🖐🖐 (@DrGilchrist) March 30, 2020

 
My old pal Dick Puddlecote has often said that the obsessive puritans who have weaselled their way into the ‘public health’ movement are not interested in health. This little story illustrates that perfectly. These people would rather see people die in agony than allow one of their disfavoured industries to provide life-saving equipment.

It's one thing to die for your beliefs, but expecting other people to die for them is a step too far.

The current pandemic will leave us poorer and weaker in many ways, but if, when the dust settles, people realise what the bottom feeders of fake 'public health' are like, some good many yet come of it.