Chris Whitty vs fat jabs

Our fun loving Chief Medical Officer thinks fat people shouldn't rely on Ozempic and should wait for "public health" to save them instead.

 

Speaking at the Medical Journalists’ Association annual lecture last week, the Chief Medical Officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty took at pop at “fat jabs” such as Mounjaro and Ozempic. Thrashing away at a strawman of his own construction, he asked: “Does anyone in this group believe that the correct answer is to allow obesity to rise because of pretty aggressive marketing of obesogenic foods to children and then stick them on GLP-1 agonists at the age of 18?” 

“Just relying on the drugs seems to me the wrong answer,” he said. To which we might ask, who is just relying on the drugs? Not the public, most of whom manage to avoid “living with obesity” by controlling their appetite and doing a spot of exercise, and certainly not the politicians, who have saddled Britain with the most extensive set of anti-obesity policies anywhere in the world. 

 

Read the rest at The Critic.

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People are different. Get used to it.

I've written about how people are different for The Critic. It is a point that seems to elude those who talk about the gateway effect.

 

Most social scientists pay lip service to the old adage about correlation not equalling causation, but the temptation to find a deeper meaning in statistical relationships can be hard to resist. In Australia, which is becoming a centre of excellence for human stupidity, an anti-vaping program was recently launched on the basis that: “Studies have shown that engaging in unsafe sex, other substance abuse, drink driving, texting while driving and driving without a seatbelt are associated with increased e-cigarette use among youth”. I dare say they are, but a campaign to reduce unsafe sex by clamping down on e-cigarettes (which, incidentally, are already illegal in Australia) is as doomed to failure as a campaign to reduce drownings by clamping down on ice cream sales. 

 

Do read it all. 

 

 

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On the Matt Forde podcast

It was my great pleasure to appear on Matt Forde's Political Party podcast last week. You can listen to it here. Here's his blurb for it...

What is lifestyle economics and why does it matter?

The IEA's Christopher Snowdon is a fun-loving political thinker and explains his opposition to puritanism, why we should have more freedom and what that would mean for our policies on smoking, alcohol, gambling and the very existence of the NHS.

Also... what are ultra-processed foods and are they necessarily bad?

 

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Britain's black market in tobacco is too big to ignore

Figures published last week show that legal tobacco sales fell by 52% in the United Kingdom between 2021 and 2025. The volume of manufactured cigarettes sold dropped by 46%, from 23.4 billion sticks to 12.6 billion sticks, while the volume of rolling tobacco fell by 59%, from 8.6 million kilograms to 3.6 million kilograms.

The decline in legal rolling tobacco sales is particularly significant because loose tobacco has been subject to the heaviest tax rises in recent years, with the duty rate doubling since 2020. Rolling tobacco is often the last resort for low income smokers before they turn to the black market.

Converting kilograms of rolling tobacco into sticks, we find that a total of 19.8 billion cigarettes were sold legally in the UK in 2025, less than half the figure recorded in 2021 (40.6 billion).¹ This decline is far greater than any estimate of the decline in the smoking rate. These estimates vary. According to the Opinion & Lifestyle Survey, the smoking rate among people aged 16 or older in Great Britain fell from 12.7% to 9.1% between 2021 and 2024. According to the Annual Population Survey, the rate among people aged 18 or older in the United Kingdom fell from 12.3% to 10.5% in the same period. Neither survey has an estimate for 2025 yet, but the monthly Smoking Toolkit Study suggests that the rate of daily cigarette smoking in England was 10.6% in 2025, only modestly less than in 2021 when the rate was 11.4%. 

If the Smoking Toolkit Study is correct then overall tobacco consumption has barely changed since 2021 and it is a mathematical certainty that at least 50% of the market is illicit. If the other estimates are correct, the illicit share is still much larger than the official estimate of 13% from HMRC. 

I may return to the question of why estimates of smoking prevalence are so different and why HMRC's estimate is so wrong in the future. For now, read my analysis of the latest data on the IEA Insider Substack. 

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