The 'intimidation' of 'public health' cranks

Anna Gilmore has been dipping into the millions of pounds she gets from Mike Bloomberg to complain about people being mean to her. Her latest 'study', titled 'Intimidation against advocates and researchers in the tobacco, alcohol and ultra-processed food spaces: a review', is the usual Google-based fluff and is a bit rich from someone who set up a fake wiki to smear her opponents and who starts her article by describing the infant formula industry as a 'vector of disease'.

What kind of intimidation do these delicate poppets have to put up with?

The most reported form of intimidation was public discreditation with advocates and researchers often portrayed as extremists, under-qualified, or a waste of taxpayer money.

Well, if the cap fits...

Gilmore and her chums then give an enjoyably long list of examples...

Researchers were publicly labelled as ‘extremists’ (Landman et al., 2002; Malone, 2002; Knight and Chapman, 2004; Yang and Malone, 2008; Avery et al., 2016; Johnson, 2020), ‘fascists’ (Smith and Malone, 2007), ‘nazis’ (Schneider and Glantz, 2008), ‘zealots’ (Daube, 2015), ‘demons of overzealous and moral righteousness’ (Knight and Chapman, 2004) and ‘prohibitionists’ (Landman and Glantz, 2009; Daube, 2015). Similarly, those producing research unfavourable to the alcohol industry were labelled ‘nannyists’ (Avery et al., 2016), those doing the same in the UPF sector were called ‘too radical’ (Mialon, 2021), ‘food fascists’ (CCF, 2010), ‘gastronomical gestapo’ (Thomson, 2009) and ‘food police’ (Heisel, 2011), while breastfeeding advocates were described as the ‘breastapo’ (Hager, 2014) and were portrayed as ‘limiting mothers’ freedom of choice’ (Baker et al., 2021). Negative religious connotations were also used across the different industry sectors, with academics referred to as the ‘anti-food jihad’ (CCF, 2004), ‘health jihadists’ (Hager, 2014) and ‘religious fundamentalists’ (Petticrew et al., 2015; RESYST, 2019).

In addition, across all sectors, researchers were criticized as lacking the relevant skills (Drope and Chapman, 2001; Landman and Glantz, 2009; RESYST, 2019), being ‘bogus’ (Landman and Glantz, 2009), ‘untrustworthy’ (Vedwan, 2007), ‘mad’ (Hager, 2014), having conflicts of interest (Ibrahim et al., 2004), being money hungry (White and Bero, 2004; Landman and Glantz, 2009; Hoe et al., 2021), ‘publicly funded troughers’ (Hager, 2014) or simply for being ‘peculiar’ (Bornhäuser et al., 2006) or for not having the right physique to criticize the food industry (Pollan, 2006).

 

Pejorative adjectives were the most common form of 'intimidation'. The second most common form of 'intimidation' was legal action. And then there is the horror of people complaining about them. For example...

 

A further six sources (9.4%) included examples where advocates and researchers working on issues affecting UPF, and in one case tobacco, received a complaint. These complaints took several forms, including a detailed critique of research and a request for the original data for ‘proper’ analyses to be conducted.

Oh no, not a detailed critique! Anything but that!

 

Some of the 'intimidation' amounts to nothing more than polite disagreement...

 

UNICEF’s Director General received complaints from a US-based lobby group working for the baby formula industry. The complaints argued that UNICEF’s Philippines country office promoting breastfeeding ‘misrepresents the available scientific evidence regarding the alleged risks of not-breastfeeding’.

 

It is probably true that 'public health' academics get more abuse online and are called names more often in the media than most other academics, but most other academics are not political activists using taxpayers' money to restrict the freedom of the individual. If you're going to get involved in politics, you have to expect some rough and tumble. What these people want is power without accountability. They explicitly seek to stigmatise ('denormalise') millions of people, make them poorer through sin taxes and ban the things they enjoy doing. They want to be seen as serious academics but normal people see them, quite rightly, as authoritarian killjoys who are making an unprovoked assault on their lifestyle (including the right of mothers who cannot breastfeed to keep their baby alive). If a few of their powerless victims are calling them 'mad' and 'peculiar' on social media, they have got off very lightly.