Anti-Vaping Activists Want Censorship in Public Health Research
The evidence is unequivocal at this point: vaping is the most effective smoking-cessation tool that’s ever been conceived. While that’s good news for smokers looking for a viable way to quit cigarettes, it has created an existential dilemma for anti-tobacco activists: if there’s no smokers, there’s no tobacco use to demonize, tax and regulate.
Since vaping is markedly safer than smoking and helps millions of people quit cigarettes, tobacco prohibitionists have resorted to attacking the vaping industry instead of making a science-based argument against the use of our products. The authors of this just-published study in Tobacco Control unintentionally outlined this disingenuous strategy for the world to see.
The authors alleged that vaping companies, like cigarette makers in previous decades, fund and conduct scientific research not to reduce the harms of smoking but to protect their profits. These firms produce “research and opinion which supports tobacco industry interests by: side-lining evidence-based tobacco control measures and endorsing interventions which ensure the sale of industry products.”
The problem is this: the authors of this study are guilty of the very ethical breaches they have wrongly accused our industry of commiting. Their hypocrisy is but one example of a larger trend of corruption and double standards in the tobacco-control movement that poses a grave threat to public health.
The study’s specific focus was the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (FSFW), a tobacco harm reduction group funded by Philip Morris International (PMI). The authors specified five complaints about the foundation’s work. As we’ll see, each of these applies to tobacco-control activism. Let’s take them in turn.
Industry-friendly research
It’s not clear why the researchers were so perturbed by the foundation’s advocacy for smoke-free nicotine products. But given their opposition to undue financial influence on science, it’s worth noting that all three authors—Tess Legg, Bryan Clift and Anna B Gilmore—are employed by the University of Bath in the UK, which received $20 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2018 to launch a “global tobacco industry watchdog.”
Bloomberg, of course, is the biggest benefactor of anti-vaping activism in the world, contributing more than half a billion dollars to tobacco control efforts since 2017—the same year FSFW was founded. In fact, you’ll never guess who paid for this very study:
This raises a perplexing question: why is it unethical for an industry-backed nonprofit to promote the demonstrable health benefits of vaping, but acceptable for a university to accept millions from an ideological billionaire to attack e-cigarettes? According to retired University of Sydney public health professor Simon Chapman, Bloomberg grantees are ethically superior to their scientific opponents, meaning they can take boatloads of private cash without creating conflicts of interest for themselves:
That excuse may seem reasonable to tobacco-control activists, but it’s an obvious double standard that nicely illustrates how financial conflicts of interest can distort science and harm public health. In this case, Bloomberg’s lavish support for anti-vaping research and activism encourages millions of smokers to keep using cigarettes, as the prestigious Chronicles of Philanthropy pointed out several years ago.
Hiding Industry involvement
The study authors were also alarmed by FSFW’s supposed attempts to obscure industry support for scientific research. This accusation is baseless since the foundation openly acknowledges its affiliation with PMI and maintains a library of scientific publications it has funded and a list of grants it has awarded.
To be sure, there is lots of undisclosed funding influencing the public discussion about vaping, but it’s not coming from the industry. Alongside Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Gates and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations (RWJF) contribute many millions of dollars to anti-vaping advocacy. The money filters out from these three foundations to an army of academics, NGOs, lobbyists, PR firms, lawyers, front groups and even journalists.
Until an AVM investigation exposed the financial relationships between these various outfits, they were largely concealed from public view. That’s a problem because, contra Simon Chapman, many of the organizations driving the anti-vaping narrative are indeed motivated by profit.
For example, RWJF is heavily invested in nicotine replacement therapies that compete with vaping products. Does that mean the public health groups and universities that receive support from RWJF have an incentive to attack vaping? Yes, and the Tobacco Control paper unintentionally explained why:
… [Fi]nancial links can create an ‘implicit demand’ for researchers’ work to benefit the funder, and those in receipt of funds can respond to such pressures unintentionally and subconsciously.
Funding media coverage
Does industry funding distort media coverage of vaping? The study authors claimed so, highlighting Filter Magazine and several other FSFW-supported news outlets that allegedly “disseminate both FSFW-funded research and critiques of science which may threaten the tobacco industry.”
But if the University of Bath is worried about corporate money distorting the news, we wonder why they said nothing about Politico, CNN, Associated Press, NPR or The Conversation, all which have received substantial funding from the three anti-vaping foundations discussed above.
The study authors also had nothing to say about their fellow Bloomberg grantee Vital Strategies, which funnels money to two non-profit journalism outlets. These organizations then publish slanted news reports in major media outlets, including The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Telegraph and HuffPost.
Rallying against tobacco-control advocacy
The silliest of the study’s allegations was that FSFW speaks “in hostile terms against individuals and organizations that create and disseminate science unfavorable to the tobacco industry.”
The foundation has certainly been critical of some organizations in the tobacco-control movement, including the Bloomberg-backed groups that collaborate with the University of Bath. But no reasonable person could call this measured criticism “hostile.” If we want to talk about hostility, here are just a few examples we have to discuss:
The FDA’s willingness to silence and punish its own scientists for challenging the agency’s hardline-stance against vaping.
Scientific conferences that exclude researchers simply because they are affiliated with FSFW.
The Truth Intiative’s attempt to block industry-affiliated scientists from publishing in peer-reviewed medical journals.
The researchers had nothing to say about these obvious examples of hostility. Even though several medical journals have given in to Truth’s bullying and now refuse to publish industry-funded research, the authors had the temerity to complain that “FSFW and its grantees often self-publish reports on their websites … creating an evidence base which has not had its robustness assessed through independent peer review.”
Renormalizing tobacco
If the researchers’ allegation about “hostility” was the silliest, their most Orwellian accusation was that FSFW is renormalizing the tobacco industry. A few seconds of critical thinking reveal the absurdity of this charge. The vaping industry serves adults who have quit smoking or are in the process of quitting. Recent (and peer-reviewed) research has shown that increases in vape sales tend to precede declines in cigarette sales, “consistent with [e-cigarettes] being the driver of these changes,” the authors of a January 2023 study noted.
In other words, e-cigarettes are rapidly displacing combustible tobacco as millions of smokers switch to vaping. Our industry is denormalizing the tobacco industry as fewer people use its products.
If anybody is renormalizing the tobacco industry, it’s tobacco-control activists themselves. They would deny this charge, but just consider how they operate. California recently tried to ban cigarette sales to anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 2007. Who refused to support the proposal? Anti-smoking groups that are funded by cigarette taxes. Who continues to authorize the sale of new cigarette brands while banning 99.9 percent of vaping products? The FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, which is funded by user fees paid by combustible tobacco companies. Who produces anti-smoking ads that perversely encourage people to keep smoking? Anti-smoking groups and FDA regulators. As one observer put it, “without tobacco there is nothing for tobacco control to control.”
It’s not about public health
The new Tobacco Control study ultimately shows that the anti-vaping crusade isn’t about public health. The authors weren’t interested in examining the evidence related to the benefits of using e-cigarettes. Instead, they wanted to make a case against allowing the vaping industry to participate in the public discourse about tobacco harm reduction. The activists believe it’s their right to unilaterally make decisions about which low-risk nicotine products Americans have access to. How do we know? They said it themselves:
“…[I]t was not the function of this paper to draw conclusions on any potential role (or otherwise) of the industry’s newer products in reducing tobacco harms. Rather … we reiterate the standpoint that a distinction must be made between products (some of which may play a role in tackling the tobacco epidemic) and producers (who should play no role in tobacco control science and policymaking).”