A suggestion for Jacob Rees-Mogg

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is now Brexit minister, has an article in The Sun today...

 

I want Sun readers to write to me and tell me of ANY petty old EU regulation that should be abolished

The Brexit dividend is to be drawn from a few great projects but it will also come from hundreds of small actions that make daily life a little bit easier. 

... I implore you all to write to me with the regulations you want abolished — those which make life harder for small businesses, which shut out competition, or simply increase the cost of operating. Through thousands of small changes, we can enact real economic change — which means The Sun’s readers will feel a real Brexit bonus in their pockets and in their lives  every day.

 

I applaud this initiative, but would draw his attention to a statement from the public health minister yesterday.

 

Martyn Day (SNP): To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 15 December 2021 to Question 84415 on Oral Tobacco: Health Hazards, if he will publish his Department's assessment on the risks of adverse health outcomes caused by snus.

Maggie Throup (Conservative): There is no available data related to the mortality rate as a result of the use of cigarettes or for Swedish snus. The Department has made no formal assessment of adverse health outcomes caused by snus. However, there is evidence of increased all-cause mortality among snus users although this is lower than for tobacco smokers. Snus use also has cardiovascular risks.

We are exploring a range of proposals to reduce the harms caused by smoking as part of the forthcoming tobacco control plan. This will not include proposals to introduce additional tobacco products into the market, such as oral tobacco.

 

As Professor David Nutt, chair of the Drug Science group, says...

 

'ignoring the remarkable health benefits of snus is an extremely retrograde step. Snus has almost totally eliminated smoking in Sweden and is on the way to doing the same in Norway – just a few years after being introduced. There is no evidence that snus is a risk factor for any form of cancer. There is overwhelming evidence that it reduces harm.'

 

The 'cardiovascular risks' of snus are equivalent to those from nicotine patches and insofar as snus users have 'increased all-cause mortality' it has nothing to do with the snus since snus does not cause cancer or any other serious disease. 

The ban on snus was a shameful episode in the EU's history. It should have been reversed in the last Tobacco Products Directive, but epic corruption got in the way. The man at the centre of it - John Dalli - is in court this week on charges of bribery. 

There is no scientific or ethical justification for the ban, so why not write to Mr Rees-Mogg and let him know?

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Political journalists don't understand Chaotic Evil

I've written a little something for The Critic about the verbal assault on Keir Starmer which political journalists have (willfully?) misunderstood.

 

Political journalists have a habit of assuming that what matters to them matters to everybody. They also tend to assume that they are dealing with rational actors. And so when they see Keir Starmer accosted by a mob and hear the word “paedophile”, they immediately make a connection to the story that has preoccupied them and the rest of the Westminster lobby for the last week and to the broader story of whether the Prime Minister can survive. Here, it seemed to them, was cause and effect. It was proof that the story had “cut through” to ordinary people and that Johnson’s fake news had inflamed their animal passions. 

But the “protesters” are quite obviously neither rational nor ordinary and they cannot be understood by journalists who think the world revolves around Prime Minister’s Questions and cabinet reshuffles. They are a tiny group of people on the fringes of mental health with no coherent political views who are understandably ignored by the media most of the time despite their frequent visits to Trafalgar Square. Their obsession with paedophile rings has no more broader political significance than their obsession with “clot shots’, the World Economic Forum or, er, low emission zones.

 

Have a read.

If you've been following this story, you may also be interested with this interview with some of the protesters. 

 

Well, well, well, well. The protestors that harassed Kier Starmer yesterday have a whole different version of events than the media and blue ticks have been pushing. Another failed blame game. Credit @timmyvoe
pic.twitter.com/jgfFYDg4vd

— David Foxx (@thatfoxxybloke) February 8, 2022

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The thirdhand smoke grift continues

Third-hand smoke is the health scare that really never took off but won't quite die. That's mainly thanks to the persistence of psychologist Georg Matt who managed to get hold of a stack of cash from the Californian government to set up the laughable Thirdhand Smoke Resource Centre.

Matt is back with yet another study today... 

 

Almost all kids have tobacco on their hands, even in non-smoking homes

Young children touch everything - carpets, tabletops, toys, clothes, etc. - and then touch their mouths and faces. This makes them especially vulnerable to thirdhand smoke, the chemical residue from tobacco smoke left behind in dust and on surfaces after someone smokes or vapes.

 

How does their health suffer when they encounter this terrifying substance? Alas, the researchers don't say.

 

A team of researchers from San Diego State University and the University of Cincinnati used a novel method of swabbing the hands of children 11 years of age and younger to measure the levels of nicotine present, an indicator of thirdhand smoke exposure. 

More than 97% of the 504 children in the study had some level of nicotine present on their hands. More surprisingly, more than 95% of children in non-smoking households and home smoke bans still had nicotine on their hands.

 

This is a tribute to the incredible sensitivity of whatever they're using to pick up these tiny traces of nicotine.

 

The researchers plan to continue analyzing other markers of thirdhand smoke exposure and investigate health outcomes. They hope their research will further support stricter smoking bans, remediation practices, and policies requiring real estate agents and landlords to disclose thirdhand smoke levels in homes.

 

Nothing screams 'serious science' like the researchers telling you what policy objectives they hope to achieve by doing it!

 

Great use of taxpayers' money.

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A swift half with Ed West

There's a new episode of the Swift Half. This week I spoke to conservative journalist and author Ed West whose latest book I strongly recommend.

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Getting the facts right with Tim Stockwell

Neo-temperance activist-academic Tim Stockwell has been talking to the Irish media about minimum pricing...

Everyone in the alcohol research and epidemiology world pretty much agrees that MUP is probably the single most effective strategy to reduce drinking with the least downsides. In Scotland, which brought it in in 2018, alcohol consumption and deaths have already gone down.

So whatever people feel about it, I think it’s really good to get the facts straight because they’re very well researched.

 

Yes, it is very important to get the facts straight. Facts like Scotland's rate of alcohol-related mortality being at a nine year high, for example.  

 

Could more expensive booze lead to people drinking cheaper liquids, like hand sanitizer or rubbing alcohol?

The studies we’ve done with people with severe alcohol use disorders show “non-beverage” is their absolute last resort. Mostly, they avoid it like the plague.

The proof in the pudding is this – you wouldn’t get the decrease in liver cirrhosis rates we see if they were just shifting their drinking.

 

What decrease in liver cirrhosis rates would this be? The link (which I assume Stockwell gave the journalist to insert) goes to a study from 2014, four years before minimum pricing was tried anywhere. Its lead author is MUP campaigner Nick Sheron and all it did was look at how much some heavy drinkers who had liver cirrhosis spent on alcohol and work out how much more they would spend under minimum pricing. It didn't even model the impact on liver cirrhosis rates. 

 

Facts, eh?

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Swapping fizzy drinks for beer

Hello again, sweet substitution effects...

 

Impact of the Seattle Sweetened Beverage Tax on substitution to alcoholic beverages

Introduction

Taxes are increasingly used as a policy tool aimed at reducing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), given their association with adverse health outcomes including type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease. However, a potential unintended consequence of such a policy could be that the tax induces substitution to alcoholic beverages.

Indeed. Studies have found some evidence of this in the past.

Results

At two-years post-tax implementation, volume sold of beer in Seattle relative to Portland increased by 7% (ratio of incidence rate ratios [RIRR] = 1.07, 95% CI:1.00,1.15), whereas volume sold of wine decreased by 3% (RIRR = 0.97, 95% CI:0.95,1.00). Overall alcohol (both beer and wine) volume sold increased in Seattle compared to Portland by 4% (RIRR = 1.04, 95% CI:1.01,1.07) at one-year post-tax and by 5% (RIRR = 1.05, 95% CI:1.00,1.10) at two-years post-tax. The implied SSB cross-price elasticities of demand for beer and wine, respectively, were calculated to be 0.35 and -0.15.

Well played, people of Seattle. Well played.

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The Covid Jeremiahs

I've written about England's dire Covid modelling for The Critic. 

It is not as if the models only seem flawed in hindsight. The idea that Covid could kill 5,000 people a day in heavily vaccinated England was always insane. It would require an infection rate so enormous that the whole thing would burn itself out within days. 

In an interview with The Times, Graham Medley admitted that the chances of there being 7,000 hospital admissions a day in October was as unlikely as Burnley winning the Premiership, but it was included in the model because it was theoretically possible. By implication, admissions never reaching 1,000 a day — which is what actually happened — was not included in the model because it was considered to be essentially impossible.

Something has gone badly wrong when likely outcomes are routinely treated as black swan events. It is not true, as some believe, that the modellers only look at worst case scenarios. Perhaps the most pitiful aspect of this pseudo-science is that the models include such a huge range of scenarios that dumb luck should ensure that one or two of them hit the mark. In reality, with only a handful of exceptions, a blindfolded chimpanzee could do better. This suggests something more than mere incompetence. It suggests a systematic bias towards pessimism and a hankering for restrictions. 

Whatever the reason, there can be no way back for the modellers after this. They have made astrology look like physics. Although I would never advocate tarring and feathering anyone, they should never be heard from again.

 

No paywall. Do read.

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