Is the European Commission about to crack down on vaping (again)?

I've written an article for Brussels Reporter about the clouds gathering over vaping in the EU. Last year, the EU’s Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks (SCHEER) published a preliminary opinion on electronic cigarettes. As I said at the time...

 

Reading it is like taking a step back in time, or being in Australia.

The authors of the SCHEER report appear to be biased against e-cigarettes and harm reduction. The report reheats several arguments, such as the ‘gateway effect’ and the ‘renormalisation’ hypothesis, which are now a decade old and have been contradicted by real world evidence. While it downplays strong evidence showing that e-cigarettes have been a gateway from smoking for millions of people, it amplifies speculation about hypothetical risks. When the authors are unable to find adequate evidence for anti-vaping claims, they quote from organisations which share the same prejudice. Much of the evidence is treated selectively and some of the conclusions made about the strength of evidence are baffling.  

 

The final draft was published earlier this month. Some of its claims were toned down but it remains a one-sided and inaccurate piece of work. So what? Well, as I say in today's article... 

This is a worry for consumers because the SCHEER report is designed to alert the European Commission to the ‘potential need for legislative amendments’ to the Tobacco Products Directive.

It wanted to regulate e-cigarettes as medical devices in the last Tobacco Products Directive, which came into force in 2016. Its plans were derailed by the European Parliament, but it may soon try again. The European Commission seems particularly interested in banning flavours in e-cigarette products, a policy copied from American prohibitionists which would make vaping much less appealing to smokers who are thinking of switching to a product that could save their lives.

In reality, the SCHEER report does not compel the Commission to do anything. The only evidence for health risks which the SCHEER report rates as ‘strong’ in the final opinion relates to poisoning and injuries due to burns and explosions. These hazards have already been dealt with in the existing Tobacco Products Directive and do not require further legislation.

However, while the report does not explicitly call for any new laws, it gives the European Commission ammunition if it wishes to table some. As the evidence that e-cigarettes are relatively harmless and effective smoking cessation devices continues to grow, the SCHEER report will be used as a crutch for those who continue to lobby against them.

 

It could soon be time for vapers to make their voices heard in Brussels again.

 

Meanwhile, the corrupt and incompetent World Health Organisation is up to its old tricks. To mark World No Tobacco Day, it has put out this rubbish about e-cigarettes...

 

The tobacco industry has continuously attempted to subvert these life-saving public health measures. Over the last decade, the tobacco industry has promoted e-cigarettes as cessation aids under the guises of contributing to global tobacco control. Meanwhile, they have employed strategic marketing tactics to hook children on this same portfolio of products, making them available in over 15,000 attractive flavours.

The scientific evidence on e-cigarettes as cessation aids is inconclusive and there is a lack of clarity as to whether these products have any role to play in smoking cessation. Switching from conventional tobacco products to e-cigarettes is not quitting.

"We must be guided by science and evidence, not the marketing campaigns of the tobacco industry – the same industry that has engaged in decades of lies and deceit to sell products that have killed hundreds of millions of people”, said WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “E-cigarettes generate toxic chemicals, which have been linked to harmful health effects such as cardiovascular disease & lung disorders."

 

Disgraceful.

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Carbohydrate hysteria

First published by Spectator Health in June 2018

One of Twitter’s odder subcultures warns you of its obsessive presence with the hashtag #LCHF. It stands for ‘low carb, high fat’ and its followers have remarkably strong feelings about carbohydrates. Why? Mostly because they used to be fat and then they gave up carbs. They are no longer fat and so, QED, carbs are the cause of obesity and people shouldn’t worry about calories or physical activity. Silly old scientists won’t admit this profound but hidden truth because they have been bought off by Big Grain or Big Pharma or something, but who needs scientists when you have personal testimony?

This rebadged version of the Atkin’s Diet works for many people, at least in the short term, but the conclusions of some of its disciples are based on magical thinking, rather like a cargo cult. People lose weight when they cut out the carbs because they are cutting out a lot of calories. Carbs are easily accessible and energy-dense. That has been their selling point for thousands of years. In a typical meal, the meat provides the protein, the vegetables provide the vitamins and minerals, and the carbs provide the calories (plus fibre, protein, B vitamins and flavour). People in every society on Earth bulk out their meals with bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, noodles or whatever source of cheap carbohydrate is available to fill their stomachs and give them energy. If you cut these foods out of your diet or replace them with vegetables, there is a very good chance that you are going to lose weight.

A low carb diet is not an alternative to cutting down on calories. It is a way of cutting down on calories. It doesn’t guarantee weight loss because you could still gorge yourself on cheese and bacon, but it is so restrictive that you are likely to substitute lower calorie food in practice. In its purest form, it is a highly restrictive diet. A diet which forbade you from eating any food that begins with a letter between N and Z in the alphabet would have much the same effect.

The same magical thinking can be seen in the LCHF view of diabetes. It is well known that obesity increases the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, perhaps by a factor of seven. In recent years, it has also become accepted that the disease is reversible in some patients through intense weight loss. Since a highly restrictive diet like LCHF can lead to rapid weight loss, there are low carb enthusiasts who have seen their diabetes go into remission. With a little cargo cult science, it is easy to come to the conclusion that a low carb lifestyle is the cure for Type 2 diabetes and, by association, that carbohydrates are the cause of Type 2 diabetes.

This is not the conclusion that mainstream scientists have come to. Rather boringly, they prefer the more obvious interpretation that obesity is a risk factor for Type 2 diabetes, that obesity is caused by excess calories, and that both obesity and diabetes can be addressed by creating a calorie deficit. This is not just their opinion. It is based on empirical evidence. For example, the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition found no association between carbohydrate intake and body mass in its latest evidence review and, with regards to diabetes, it concluded…

 

No significant association was found between total carbohydrate intake as g/ day and incidence of type 2 diabetes mellitus (RR 0.96, 95% CI 0.86, 1.08 for each 70g/ day increase; p=0.5).

Now, I am as happy as the next man to believe that a scientific consensus can be wrong, but if it is a choice between trusting nutritional scientists on the one hand and a bunch of keyboard warriors and diet book salesmen on the other, I will go with the consensus.

You might also be expected to go with the consensus if you were a BBC executive commissioning a documentary about carbohydrates, especially if your programme was called ‘The Truth About Carbs’ rather than, say, ‘A Theory About Carbs’. But no. ‘The Truth About Carbs’, which was broadcast on BBC1 last week, was presented by Dr Xand van Tulleken, a medic who has written a diet book. He used to weigh 19 stone because, as he asserted it at the start of his programme, he loved eating carbs.

So began an hour of television which purported to show the benefits of a low carb diet but which actually showed the benefits of a reduced-calorie diet that is high in vegetables. First, van Tulleken split carbs into three categories of his own making: ‘beige carbs’ (pasta, rice, etc. which were portrayed as bad), ‘white carbs’ (refined sugar, which were portrayed as unspeakably bad), and ‘green carbs’ (fruit and veg, which were portrayed as being acceptable because they contain fibre).

He then tried to convince the viewer that beige carbs are really white carbs in disguise by having a dietitian explain how much energy is released into the human body by ingesting the likes of a jacket potato or a bowl of rice. The normal way of doing this would be to give the calorie count, but low carbers don’t believe in counting calories and so sugar cubes were used instead. Sugar cubes are often used to illustrate the amount of refined sugar that is added to fizzy drinks, but in this instance the sugar was neither refined nor added, nor even in the food. It was the amount of glucose produced naturally by the human body as part of the digestive process; a rather different proposition.

Members of the public were asked how many ‘sugar cubes’ were in various food products. The big reveal came when the dietitian explained that a jacket potato releases twice as much energy in the form of glucose as a chocolate muffin. ‘There’s 19 sugar cubes in this jacket potato,’ she declared, not entirely truthfully. A bowl of rice was shown to be even worse, with 20 quasi-sugar cubes. The effect on the members of the public was immediate and predictable. ‘It’s grains of sugar that we’re eating!’ said one. ‘I’m not eating rice no more,’ said another.

I don’t want to sound like a Reithian paternalist, but it seems irresponsible of the BBC to give its viewers the strong impression that a chocolate muffin is a healthier option than a bowl of rice. Aside from the other nutritional considerations, a chocolate muffin has at least 50 per cent more calories than a bowl of rice, and yet this went unmentioned by van Tulleken who concluded the segment by saying:

 

‘The thing that this really rams home for me is that there is a huge amount of energy in a potato, and that pile of glucose that your body will turn the potato into will be stored as fat unless you burn it off.’

There are about 250 calories in a jacket potato. Regardless of whether you consider this to be a ‘huge amount’ (it is only a tenth of an adult male’s recommended intake), energy from any type of food will be ‘stored as fat unless you burn it off’. This basic truth was never alluded to in The Truthiness About Carbs. How could it be? If van Tulleken had acknowledged the laws of thermodynamics he would have debunked his own programme.

The BBC’s intrepid truth-seeker then travelled north to visit Dr David Unwin who lives the low carb life and recommends his patients do likewise. Although the documentary offered no hint that Unwin was anything other than an ordinary family doctor, he is a controversial figure by his own admission. A low carb manifesto he co-authored in 2016 was widely criticised by scientists and was such an embarrassment to its publishers at the National Obesity Forum that its trustees issued a statement to ‘make it completely and transparently clear that they were not given the opportunity to see the document, or give any input into it’. Several of them resigned on principle. It would have been interesting to see Unwin respond to his critics. Instead, van Tulleken asked him softball questions like this:

Van Tulleken: ‘Is it fair to say that almost everyone in the UK is eating more carbs than they need and more carbs than is good for them?’

Unwin: ‘I think that’s probably fair.’

The less said about the rest of the programme, the better. Suffice to say that van Tulleken underwent a colonoscopy while interviewing a bowel cancer specialist and came away with the conclusion that low carb diets reduce bowel cancer risk despite the specialist saying nothing of the sort. He then got a chef to cook some reduced-calorie meals for a group of overweight people in Merseyside, telling him that their ‘lives depend on you seducing them with low carb food.’ Sure enough, after two weeks on a reduced calorie diet that was high in fruit and vegetables, they were healthier and had lost weight. Van Tulleken treated this as a near-miraculous demonstration of the dangers of carbohydrates. Eating well, he concluded, is about ‘counting the carbs, not the calories’.

Whatever public service broadcasting is, The Truth About Carbs was the opposite. Scientifically illiterate, willfully misleading and ludicrously one-sided, it ensured that no matter how little the viewer knew about nutrition when they tuned in, they would know less about it by the time it was over.

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Vaping junk science and the gateway effect

Carl Phillips has written the definitive critique of low quality vaping research (available in draft form here). He looks at the most popular studies (as measured by their Google Scholar ranking) and concludes that the whole field is plagued by fatal flaws. Some of the problems are intractable, but researchers could get closer to answering the key questions if they improved their methodology and looked at the issue down the right end of the telescope. Most of the time they can't be bothered or they deliberately choose sloppy methods to get the answers they want.

A classic example is the so-called gateway hypothesis - that taking up vaping leads people who would otherwise not become smokers to start smoking. Although many studies have purported to find such an effect, it has been pointed out ad nauseam that the kind of people who start vaping are often - usually? - the kind of people who would have started smoking had e-cigarettes never been invented. The fact that smoking rates tend to decline as vaping prevalence increases strongly suggests that the gateway effect is either nonexistent or so negligible that it is easily outweighed by the gateway in the opposite direction, ie. people using vaping as a means to quit smoking.

Some researchers have sought, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to control for this personality trait, but it is an intractable problem. Carl's explains better than anyone else why this is...

 

Though not strictly trans-scientific, it turns out to be practically impossible to assess whether vaping is causing people to smoke (let alone become smokers) with any of the data that is apparently available. Even the best potential matching or deconfounder covariates are inadequate to control for propensity to use a tobacco product. The covariates used in practice are nowhere near close enough. Variables that are supposed to control for the propensity are typically measures of “risk taking” or “rebellious” behavior and perhaps inclination to use drugs of any sort. (These are often described with the phrase “common liability”, another term that should be avoided by ethical researchers because of the obvious pejorative double entendre of the word “liability”. Notice that in other contexts where there is a common cause -- the appropriate scientific term -- that makes someone more liable to choose both the exposure and outcome, researchers never use this loaded phrase.) 

The variables used are terribly imprecise proxies for the overall propensities to take risks and use drugs. Moreover, the proxies should include the logistics of someone’s peer and adult social environment, which are at least as important as attitudinal inclinations, but do not. But even if “risk taking” proclivity were measured perfectly (which is far from the case) it could only explain such questions as why vaping is associated with motorcycle riding. It would still miss a major common cause of why vaping is associated with subsequent use of other drugs. There are inclinations, often traceable to specific psychological or environmental conditions but unlikely to be measured in a dataset, that cause a desire to pursue not “risk” or “rebellion” generally, but specifically pursue altered states of consciousness. This is the major, and effectively intractable, confounding problem for honest attempts to assess various drug gateway claims.

Yet it turns out that in the present case, the “risk taking” and “rebellious” variables plus wanting altered states are still not the most important nearly-intractable confounding problem. A “risk taker” might like motorcycles but not cannabis, someone seeking a particular altered state might like cannabis but not cocaine, and someone seeking altered states in general might still not like motorcycling. But almost everyone who likes the specific experience of smoking likes the specific experience of vaping because it is almost the same drug and almost the same behavior pattern. Researchers in this area, as well as most critics of this research, seem oblivious to this.

About half the population likes being under the influence of nicotine and half does not. This variation alone guarantees a substantially higher smoking uptake among vapers (and vice versa). This is partially a result of physiology and psychological characteristics, and partially a matter of attitude. Most people who do not use any nicotine product are actively averse to using any nicotine product. Thus people who never vape, smoke, nor use any other tobacco product will inevitably initiate one such product less often than users of one of the other products. This is no different from the fact that people who smoke one brand of cigarette are far more likely to subsequently smoke another brand than are people who do not smoke. No one would take that observation to mean that in a counterfactual world in which the first brand did not exist, the person never would have smoked any cigarette (i.e., the product that happened to be used first obviously did not cause someone to be inclined to use some product).

Attempts to control for this common cause are generally doomed. It is almost impossible to control for having a physical/psychological “taste” for nicotine, since the only good measures of it are already in use as the exposure and outcome variables. Smoking status of close relatives (getting benefits from nicotine seems to be heritable and attitudes toward it certainly are) is a very rough proxy for both tastes and attitudes, but clearly not good enough.

 

Furthermore...

 

Much of the problem here seems to be a particularly bad result of the generic problem in tobacco research of not stating, much less testing, clear causal hypotheses. An expectation that a causal study must have a clear causal hypothesis would change the entire literature. It is difficult to figure out how to non-absurdly finish the sentence, “we hypothesize that many young people who find they like vaping then switch to the harmful, less flavorful, less socially acceptable, and more expensive (in all the jurisdictions where these studies happen) alternative -- something that they would not have otherwise ever done -- because....” The only apparent non-absurd conclusions are “...because their access to vaping products was interrupted while cigarettes remained easily available” or “...because someone convinced them that smoking was less harmful to their health.” It seems unlikely the worst papers would ever have been written if the authors had been required to finish that sentence.

And so, in conclusion...

 

The lessons available from the papers in this review are almost all negative. There are several papers that are solid workaday building blocks, but their generalizable lesson is basically just the negative “don’t overreach”. But most of the papers offer only errors to learn from. The questions most of the authors here are attempting to answer simply cannot be informed by the methods they chose. There are a couple of papers that are reasonably informative about some of their study questions. But we are sadly unable to point to a single example of someone using suitable methods to try to deal with the particular challenges of answering these questions.

.. There are, however, countless sources of good building-block information that can be pieced together to provide knowledge. It is thanks to such information that we know key facts, like vaping is approximately harmless and that it helps many people quit smoking. Part of the reason those salient facts are obscured by the journal literature is the political bias of the well-funded authors. But that is not the only reason. The typical bad practice in public health type research -- pretend your data is what you wish it were rather than what it is, thoughtlessly calculate simple associations, ignore all other information, and then declare sweeping conclusions as if the outputs from one logistic regression were divine revelation -- is what allows intentional propagandists to get away with junk science. But it also makes even honest efforts largely uninformative.

 

It's a long read but anyone interested in the science of e-cigarettes should get stuck in.

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Nanny states are no healthier and no happier

The new Nanny State Index was published last week. Every time we publish it, I get people asking me whether the biggest nanny states are happier, presumably because the famously perky Scandinavian countries are mostly near the top of the index.

We know that Nanny State Index scores don't correlate with life expectancy, but do they correlate with happiness and life satisfaction scores?

Reader, they do not. Here are the NSI scores against life satisfaction scores (from Our World in Data). With an r-squared of exactly zero, there is absolutely no correlation.

Likewise, there is no correlation between Nanny State Index scores and happiness scores (from the World Values Survey - missing data for 5 countries).   

And since, as mentioned, there is no correlation between NSI scores and life expectancy (nor between NSI tobacco control scores and smoking or NSI alcohol scores and alcohol consumption), you have to ask what the point is? As Mark Littlewood says in The Times today, the nanny state simply doesn't work. 

 

I wrote an article about the Nanny State Index project for CapX last week and also one for New Europe. There's also a quick video below and you can watch the launch event here.

 

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Interview with Ronnie O'Sullivan

A very special guest on The Swift Half this week. I thought I dreamt this but here's the video evidence that it happened...

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Another big win for 'public health'

What a year it's been for the heroes of the 'public health' movement. While medics have been working tirelessly to save lives and scientists have created a series of effective vaccines, the over-funded troughers of the 'public health' racket have been busy complaining about tobacco companies donating ventilators to hospitals and alcohol companies producing hand sanitiser.

Last September, Britain's multi-million pound SPECTRUM consortium produced an unintentionally hilarious report whining about food and drink companies donating baby milk, face masks, water and hospital equipment to the needy.

 

As I said at the time...

... you could not ask for a more perfect illustration of the moral rot at the heart of the modern 'public health' movement... 

SPECTRUM would rather COVID-19 victims went without ventilators than have them supplied by businesses of whom they disapprove. When dogma conflicts with saving lives, the 'public health' racket is always happy to side with the virus.

These people see themselves as being in a branch of medicine but they know nothing about medical ethics, such as the old 'first do no harm' thing. 

Want to see some more moral rot? Then take a look at this lot in Nepal.

 

Nepal charity rejects $400,000 tobacco industry ‘donation’ after pressure from tobacco control advocates

 

The Union congratulates the Kathmandu Institute of Child Health (KIOCH) for rejecting a ‘donation’ of US$400,000 and declining a partnership offer from Surya Nepal Private Limited, the country’s largest tobacco company.

The donation was offered for a new children’s hospital, but tobacco control advocates moved quickly...

 

I should hope so. There's no time to lose when someone is trying to build a children's hospital!

 

... preventing the company’s duplicitous attempt to improve its public image while simultaneously marketing its deadly products.

 

So brave.

 

Dr Koirala, who is also the President of Nepal Medical Council, cancelled the partnership and rejected the donation on 23 April, within eight hours of mounting protests and media exposure

“This is  yet another victory against the tobacco industry and its nefarious attempts to clean up its image through so-called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities,” said Dr Tara Singh Bam, Director of The Union Asia Pacific Office. “The message is loud and clear: tobacco industry tactics to undermine public health will not be tolerated.”

 

Not all heroes wear capes.

 

In case this requires any more context, Nepal's per capita GDP is barely $1,000 a year. Five million of its children are malnourished. According to the WHO, the main causes of morbidity are diarhorreal disease, dysentery, cholera and typhoid. 

 

Turning away a donation to build a children's hospital achieves nothing. It is morally indistinguishable from burning down a children's hospital. But it gives the fanatics of 'public health' a warm feeling of self-righteousness and if the price of that is a few children dying, so be it.

 

It is not about health.   

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The 2021 Nanny State Index

Europe's hall of shame

The latest edition of the Epicenter Nanny State Index, which I've spent the last few months putting together, is published today. Regular readers will know that it's a biennial league table of the best and worst places in the Europe to eat, drink, smoke and vape.

Since the last edition was published in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has led governments around the world to impose coercive controls on an almost unprecedented scale. As the world slowly returns to normal, it is crucial that all liberties are restored.

The pandemic was a reminder of the difference between a genuine public health problem that requires collective action and self-regarding private behaviours which do not. Outbreaks of serious infectious disease are thankfully rare in the developed world and COVID-19 required an effective public health response. In Europe, too many public health agencies had been distracted by the nanny state agenda and were ill equipped to carry out their core function of protecting the public from infectious disease. Even the World Health Organisation seemed more interested in banning e-cigarettes and taxing sugary drinks than in controlling the coronavirus.

When lockdowns were introduced in the spring of 2020, paternalists seized the opportunity to impose the kind of lifestyle regulation they had hitherto only been able to dream about. At one point, one in five people worldwide were living in a country where the sale of cigarettes and e-cigarettes was illegal. For a while, a quarter of the world’s population lived under alcohol prohibition. As more people were forced to socialise outdoors, anti-smoking campaigners demanded outdoor smoking bans. Campaigners in the USA and elsewhere claimed (falsely) that vaping increased the risks of people catching the virus. E-cigarette shops and alcohol retailers were deemed ‘non-essential’ in many countries. When lockdown ended, bars reopened but some countries did not allow them to serve alcohol.

It is an ill wind that blows no good and the pandemic response also led to modest liberalisation in some places. A few countries legalised home delivery for alcoholic drinks. Some countries, such as the UK, allowed more bars to serve drinks on the street. But, overall, the pandemic gave the nanny statists an opportunity to ruthlessly exploit.

This edition of the index reflects the situation as of March 2021, but we have not included legislation that is expected to be a genuinely temporary response to the pandemic. The outlook is bleak nonetheless. Almost without exception, governments across Europe are adopting higher sin taxes and more prohibitions.

This year, the index has been expanded to thirty countries - the EU plus Iceland, Norway and the United Kingdom. Norway tops the league table although that could change once it legalises e-cigarettes. Lithuania, with its heavy temperance legislation, is again in second place while Finland drops to third.

The top of the table is dominated by Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and the British Isles. Greece is the only country from southern Europe in the top half, largely thanks to its very high sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco. At the more liberal end of the table, the best countries are a mixed bag. Germany has performed the extraordinary feat of having the lowest score in all four categories of the index. Hovering above it we find Czechia, Luxembourg, Spain and Italy, all of which have done well in previous editions. Denmark is just above this group and is the only Scandinavian country not in the top ten. That seems likely to change in the future, however. Like the Netherlands, Denmark has a slew of hardcore nanny state policies in the pipeline.

Twelve countries now have taxes on sugary drinks, ranging from five eurocents per litre in Hungary to 30 eurocents in Ireland. Several countries also tax artificially sweetened drinks. And thirteen countries tax e-cigarette fluid (up from eleven in 2019), with tax rates ranging from six eurocents per ml in Hungary to 30 eurocents in Finland and Portugal.

Germany is now the only country in the EU that could be described as smoker-friendly. Previous contenders Austria and Czechia have both introduced draconian smoking bans in recent years. The number of vaper-friendly countries is also dwindling. Seventeen of the thirty countries in the index have made it illegal to use an e-cigarette wherever smoking is prohibited. Sixteen countries have a total or near-total ban on e-cigarette advertising.

We have made a few changes to the index since the 2019 edition was published. As heated tobacco products have become popular, taxes on heated tobacco have inevitably become attractive to politicians. A new subcategory has therefore been included in the tobacco section, worth up to five points. Countries that have been foolish enough to ban these products (Malta and Norway) are given maximum points.

Ireland has pioneered the alcohol display ban (otherwise known as the booze curtain) and so a new subcategory has been added to take that into account. It is also worth five points. A subcategory for minimum alcohol pricing, which is now in force in Wales and Scotland and may soon be in place in Ireland, was added in the 2019 edition.

All taxes are adjusted for affordability in the Nanny State Index. This year, in a change to the previous methodology, we use median incomes rather than per capita GDP for this calculation. Median incomes are a better guide to the spending power of individuals, particularly in corporate tax havens where GDP does not accurately reflect average incomes.

The big picture is one of a constantly expanding nanny state raising prices and trampling freedom. The blame for this lies overwhelmingly with domestic governments, not with the European Union. The EU banned menthol cigarettes in May 2020, but it cannot be held responsible for regressive taxation, draconian smoking bans and excessive regulation of alcohol and food. The gulf between the freest countries at the bottom of the table and the least liberal countries at the top is almost entirely the result of decisions made by their own governments. Change is possible.

The Nanny State Index is a huge collaborative project which involves gathering and checking over a thousand pieces of data. As always, we thank our friends and partners across Europe who make it possible.

 

Download the publication here and visit the website here. If you spot anything that you think is an error, let me know. 

And you can watch the launch event live on YouTube at 1pm tomorrow.

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