Vapor Voice

Tag: World Health Organization

  • New Report Questions WHO’s Anti-Vaping Stance

    New Report Questions WHO’s Anti-Vaping Stance

    A new report, published today, raises major questions about the anti-vaping arguments and approach of the World Health Organization and billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg.

    The WHO and Bloomberg have both made clear their opposition to safer nicotine alternatives despite growing evidence of lower harm and efficacy for smoking cessation.

    The WHO’s tobacco control program is funded in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies. In July of this year, the two parties restated their joint position at the launch of the WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 2021: Addressing New and Emerging Products. In this report, the WHO emphasized that electronic nicotine delivery systems are “a threat to tobacco control,” are harmful, and should be banned or highly regulated. Bloomberg, in his capacity as the WHO Global Ambassador for Noncommunicable Diseases and Injuries, and founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies, stated that tobacco companies are marketing new products such as e-cigarettes to “hook another generation on nicotine.”

    The International Network of Nicotine Consumer Organizations (INNCO) has now compiled a new dossier, titled, Bloomberg, WHO and the Vaping Misinfodemic, containing statements and evidence from healthcare experts, leading academics, politicians, respected journalists and research organizations that question the stance of the WHO and Bloomberg on safer nicotine alternatives to smoking and the relationship between the two parties.

    This dossier comes just a week after the U.K. Department of Health and Social Care announced that e-cigarettes could be prescribed on the National Health Service, a world first. That move by the U.K. government provoked significant public debate around the polar opposite views towards safer nicotine alternatives, such as vaping, held by the British government and the WHO.

    The dossier also comes as the Parties to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control convene to discuss tobacco and nicotine policy.

    The outcomes from COP9 discussions will determine how international tobacco control policies are implemented at a country level across the globe to address the fact that 1.1 billion people still smoke worldwide and 8 million die every year from tobacco-related diseases.

    The dossier highlights nine reasons why serious questions need to be raised about WHO and Bloomberg’s outright opposition to safer nicotine alternatives to deadly smoking. High on the list is their failure to distinguish between smoking addiction and nicotine dependence.

    They are shifting the harm focus from smoking to tobacco to nicotine—where it obviously doesn’t belong.

    Charles A Gardner, executive director, INNCO

    “Effectively, through this failure they are shifting the harm focus from smoking to tobacco to nicotine—where it obviously doesn’t belong—nicotine does not cause cancer, heart or lung disease. Smoking does,” says Charles A Gardner, executive director at INNCO.

    This is backed up in the dossier by expert views on the profound difference between cigarette smoke and the drug, nicotine, including those expressed by Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, senior research fellow in health behaviors at the University of Oxford; Professor John Britton, emeritus professor of epidemiology University of Nottingham and special advisor to the Royal College of Physicians on Tobacco; Adam Afriye MP; and a joint statement by 15 past-Presidents of the world’s top professional society in the field of tobacco control, the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco.

    The report also scrutinizes the WHO’s role in COP events, with evidence suggesting that it is very controlling in terms of the agenda and attendance. Unlike COP26, these tobacco control COP meetings are described as “all but excluding the media,” “well-known for the routine ejection of the public from proceedings,” and “notoriously secretive.”

    The dossier also reports on claims that only tobacco control nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) allowed to attend are those who subscribe to the WHO’s tobacco harm reduction denialist stance. The U.K. Parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for Vaping recently issued a warning about the participation at COP9 of The Union, a major global NGO funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

    “The Union [International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease] recently issued a major report titled Where Bans are Best: Why Low- and Middle-Income Countries Must Prohibit E-cigarette and HTP Sales to Truly Tackle Tobacco. The Union is one of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ two top tobacco control grantees—the other is the U.S.-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids,” says Gardner.

    “We are a good case in point. INNCO, which represents and supports the rights of 98 million adults worldwide, who use safer nicotine to avoid toxic forms of tobacco, has once again been denied Observer Status at COP9 (as it was denied at COP8, and at COP7).”

    The Bloomberg, WHO and the Vaping Misinfodemic report calls for:

    • Governments around the world to collectively challenge the WHO and Bloomberg’s current prohibitionist position on safer nicotine alternatives, and to demand to know why, in the face of 8 million tobacco-related deaths every year, the tobacco control field is the only field of public health that rejects harm reduction.
    • The formation of a global independent Tobacco Harm Reduction Working Group comprised of independent scientists, global health experts, specialist academics, and people who use safer nicotine (ex-smokers)
    • Withdrawal of funding from and/or boycott of future Conference Of Parties (COP) tobacco control meetings until the WHO considers the overwhelming evidence that safer nicotine alternatives such as vapes, snus, nicotine pouches and heat-not-burn help smokers quit, and save lives
    • Complete transparency in all tobacco control funding, grants and collaborations involving the WHO and Bloomberg
    • A full independent and international review into current and past tobacco control dialogue between Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bloomberg-funded NGOs and national governments in LMICs following allegations in the Philippines that the country’s Food & Drug Administration received funds from Bloomberg groups to support the implementation of the national tobacco control program
    • A complete review of the WHO’s public web-based Q&A on e-cigarettes, which has been described as “astonishingly bad”

    The dossier also spotlights the EVALI (e-cigarette, or vaping, product-associated lung injuries) crisis of 2019. The U.S.-only outbreak of lung injuries caused by bootleg THC (cannabinoid) vape oils “cut” with one or more adulterants was wrongly reported to be caused by legal nicotine vaping.

    According to the report, the EVALI outbreak triggered Bloomberg Philanthropies to invest $160 million over a three year period to prohibit all e-cigarette flavors other than tobacco flavor. EVALI is also still incorrectly referenced by the WHO in its Q&A on vaping products in response to the question as to whether e-cigarettes cause lung injuries.

    However, by early 2020, U.S. authorities identified vitamin E acetate, a cutting agent used in some bootleg THC vaping oils—mainly in US states where cannabis remains illegal—as the primary cause of the outbreak.

    As reported in the dossier and which escaped the attention of the world’s media, last month, 75 global experts with no tobacco industry ties, including seven individuals who have served as president of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, wrote to the CDC’s Director asking her to change the name “EVALI” because it fails to alert THC vapers to their potential risks, and it misleads smokers and nicotine vapers to believe e-cigarettes were the cause.

    “I’ve spent 30 years in global health, including three years as a senior advisor on research to the WHO. For most of my career, I worked on HIV, TB, malaria, dengue, rabies, nutrition and child health issues. So, I’ve never seen anything as crazy as what’s happening now in tobacco control. What troubles me is how few people outside of my ‘little’ echo chamber, the community of millions of ex-smokers who use safer nicotine, knows what’s going on,” says Gardner.

    “There are 1.1 billion smokers now in the world, a situation that has barely changed in the last 20 years. The anti-harm reduction conservatism of the WHO and Bloomberg is not working.

    “That’s why we are calling for a global response in the form of a tobacco harm reduction working group and international governments collectively questioning and challenging the WHO and Bloomberg’s prohibitionist and evidence-denialist approach to safer nicotine. Because we are ex-smokers who use safer nicotine. We see what’s happening, and we have great empathy for smokers and ex-smokers who vape.

    “The goal is simple. Save lives. Only the starting assumptions and strategies to get there differ. These can be debated. But this debate is unethical if it does not include people who have, themselves, made the transition from smoking to not-smoking, using tobacco harm reduction products (nicotine patches, nicotine gum & lozenges, nicotine vapes, nicotine pouches, snus and HPTs).”

    “Our future policy recommendations will focus on the need to change research priorities, just as HIV/AIDS activists sought to do in the 1990s. Global tobacco control research priorities today are skewed towards finding harms of alternative nicotine products while ignoring—or not even exploring—benefits, in particular the potential therapeutic benefits of nicotine. The health benefits of medical marijuana are now recognized because of research. The potential therapeutic benefits of psilocybin are now being explored (e.g., for PTST, and even for smoking cessation). However, research to explore those potential benefits was locked in amber for 30 years because of prohibitionist drug laws.”

  • Bates: COP9 is ‘Closed Bubbles of Cultivated Groupthink’

    Bates: COP9 is ‘Closed Bubbles of Cultivated Groupthink’

    Credit: Artur

    In a new blog post, tobacco control advocate Clive Bates says that the World Health Organization’s tobacco control treaty meetings are “closed bubbles of cultivated groupthink.” Bates compares the United Nation’s climate change treaty with its tobacco control treaty , claiming the two groups use science and logic in completely different ways.

    “At the start of COP9, the head of the [Framework Convention on Tobacco Control] FCTC convention secretariat proudly drew a comparison with the other COP, the one going on in Glasgow dealing with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC),” Bates writes. “Perhaps she hoping some of the interest in UNFCCC COP-26 would rub off on the altogether more tawdry FCTC COP-9. But the tobacco COP takes an aggressive exclusionary and insular approach to stakeholders that would never be tolerated in the climate COP.”

    clive bates
    Clive Bates

    There is a sharp contrast between the climate COP meetings and tobacco COP meetings, according to Bates. The FCTC tobacco COP has “highly restrictive and opaque practices” that ensure that it operates as an “echo chamber populated by compliant observers.” He says that the COP9 chooses so-called “civil society” organizations according to their willingness to support the FCTC and contribute to its implementation.

    “It excludes many legitimate perspectives: notably consumers, pro-harm reduction public health experts, policy think tanks and critical economists, libertarians, and commercial entities affected by decisions made by COP,” he says. “For this COP, the FCTC process will be used to exclude several organizations and bolster the groupthink bubble … This insularity is not a feature of the UNFCCC climate COP meetings. A comparison with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is revealing.”

    In the FCTC, any non-governmental organization (NGO) can be refused observer status at the request of a single party. NGOs are required to be international and committed to tobacco control, ruling out most consumer organizations who see themselves as victims of tobacco control. NGO observers are required to file reports on their activity with the Secretariat for approval. 

    “The Secretariat then makes recommendations about who should be granted observer status, retained as observers, or expelled,” he says. “The ‘civil society’ organizations chosen are mainly grant-funded tobacco control organizations, often with bizarre views about public health that bear little relationship to the norms in the countries they come from or anything like good practice in policy and science.”

  • WHO Conference on Tobacco Control Starts Today

    WHO Conference on Tobacco Control Starts Today

    Image: Tobacco Reporter archive

    The Conference of the Parties to the WHO Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC) today opens its ninth session (COP9). One significant point to be discussed by the Parties is a potential new funding strategy, seen as a means of strengthening and expanding the support that can be offered to Parties of the global health treaty.

    Parties at COP9 are expected to consider how to address a common problem described by many countries—the lack of sufficient financial resources to strengthen tobacco control measures. This will mean a plan to establish a capital investment fund is high on the COP9 agenda. The Parties will decide on the adoption of a mechanism for new income streams to help fight the tobacco epidemic.

    The proposal offers the opportunity to raise a targeted $50 million for the FCTC. A similar fund will be proposed for adoption at the second session of the Meeting of the Parties to the Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products to take place later this month—but in the case of the Protocol, the fund proposed will be for $25 million to strengthen implementation of that treaty.

    In a press release, the WHO said it would continue pushing forward with comprehensive implementation of the FCTC as the real solution to the tobacco epidemic, despite what it described as tobacco industry efforts to “stir up confusion and falsely parade itself as a solution to harmful tobacco consumption.”

    The COP9 discussions Nov. 8-13 bring together Parties, representing countries, United Nations agencies, other intergovernmental organizations and civil society. The participants will be exchanging their experiences in implementing tobacco control measures and reducing the prevalence of tobacco use. They will also be looking at strategies that improve tobacco control efforts, amid what the WHO describes as “attempts by the tobacco industry to interfere in ending the tobacco epidemic that is killing over 8 million people annually.”

    During the conference, delegates will also be evaluating the most recent Global Progress Report, which was launched last week. A total of 148 Parties reported on the comprehensive tobacco control measures contained in the treaty. For example, in relation to progress on Article 11, two-thirds of Parties confirmed that the required health warnings are being displayed on tobacco product packaging and, 17 countries confirmed that they have adopted the requirements for plain packaging of tobacco products.

    Parties have reported that they have struggled to introduce comprehensive advertising, promotion and sponsorship bans. Many complained of persisting interference in policymaking by the tobacco industry.

    In her keynote speech at the opening of COP9, Adriana Blanco Marquizo, head of the Convention Secretariat referred to the ongoing COP 26, on Climate Change. There are important parallels between the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the WHO FCTC, she noted.

    “Both treaties aim to protect present and future generations,” said Blanco Marquizo. “It’s clear that tobacco damages the environment throughout its life cycle, from crop to post-consumer waste, contributing to deforestation, desertification, greenhouse emissions and plastic contamination. But probably the most important point shared at both COPs, is that the tobacco epidemic and climate change are both manmade and preventable.”

    Critics, by contrast, focused on the differences between the two COPs, with the Climate Change gathering welcoming public scrutiny and industry input, and COP9 convening behind close doors and banning dialogue with the industry.

    Immediately after COP9, the second Meeting of the Parties to the Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products will be convened, Nov. 15-18. The Protocol is a separate treaty expanding Article 15 of FCTC.

  • Harm Reduction Activists to Broadcast During COP9

    Harm Reduction Activists to Broadcast During COP9

    Image: sCOPe
    Nancy Loucas

    A group of tobacco harm reduction experts will hold a round-the-clock broadcasting event Nov. 8-12, coinciding with the Ninth Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP9) to the World health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

    Dubbed “sCOPe,” or “streaming Consumers On Point everywhere,” the five-day livestream will be simulcast via YouTube and Facebook. Presenters and panelists will challenge and scrutinize COP9, questioning, for example, who is influencing and funding its efforts to demonize vaping.

    “Before the Covid-19 pandemic, consumers were planning to front up to COP in person and show media our increasing anger for being shut out, once again, from the proceedings,” said sCOPe organizer Nancy Loucas, executive coordinator of the Coalition of Asia Pacific Harm Reduction Advocates. “The FCTC’s decision to delay COP9 and host it exclusively online, with no discussions to be publicly released, meant consumers had to take alternative action. Hence, the development of sCOPe,”

    “sCOPe is our response to being excluded from the table, as the main stakeholders, of the discussion and decision-making process that directly impacts our health and our right to make informed decisions,” she said.

  • WHO Moves FCTC Conference of the Parties to Online Forum

    WHO Moves FCTC Conference of the Parties to Online Forum

    Photo: Olrat

    The Ninth Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP9) to the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) and the Second Session of the Meeting of the Parties (MOP2) to the Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products will take place virtually, with COP9 running Nov. 8-13, 2021, and MOP2 running Nov. 15-18, 2021.

    The meetings were originally scheduled to take place in The Hague. In view of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and related travel restrictions, the WHO has decided to move the events online.

    The virtual format means participants will consider abridged agendas, the WHO wrote on its website. Several issues, including ones relating to tobacco harm reduction, will be deferred for discussion until the next regular meeting of the governing body, COP10, in 2023.

  • WHO Reiterates Unscientific Stance Against Vaping

    WHO Reiterates Unscientific Stance Against Vaping

    While progress has been made in the fight against tobacco use, the marketing of e-cigarettes toward young people could have harmful health outcomes going forward, according to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

    Ghebreyesus gave the warning in a statement along with the release of the “WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic 2021,” the eighth study from the United Nations public health agency measuring progress on efforts to curb the sale of tobacco and nicotine products worldwide.

    While the report found that more than four times as many people are covered under WHO-recommended tobacco control measures than in 2007, it expressed concern that children who use “electronic nicotine delivery systems, such as e-cigarettes, are “up to three times more likely to use tobacco products in the future.”

    “Nicotine is highly addictive. Electronic nicotine delivery systems are harmful, and must be better regulated,” Tedros said.

    He went on to argue that in places where e-cigarettes are not banned, “governments should adopt appropriate policies to protect their populations from the harms of electronic nicotine delivery systems, and to prevent their uptake by children, adolescents and other vulnerable groups.”

    Over 100 million ex-smokers use reduced-risk products and the WHO should be taking advantage of massive investment in the sector by encouraging governments to provide an incentivized regulatory framework to enable greater expansion.

    Derek Yach, president, Foundation for a Smoke-Free World

    Tobacco harm reduction advocates and vaping industry representatives denounced the WHO report as “nonsensical and dangerous.”

    “The WHO has a long-standing anti-vaping stance and this latest attack on a sector that is literally saving millions of lives worldwide flies in the face of scientific evidence, common sense and harm reduction,” said John Dunne, director general of the U.K. Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) in a statement.

    “This report demonstrates that, sadly, the WHO still doesn’t understand the fundamental difference between addiction to tobacco smoking, which kills millions of people every year, and addiction to nicotine, which doesn’t,” said John Britton, professor of epidemiology at University of Nottingham.

    “The WHO is also evidently still content with the hypocrisy of adopting a position which recommends the use of medicinal nicotine products to treat addiction to smoking, but advocates prohibition of consumer nicotine products which do the same thing, but better.”

    Derek Yach, president of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, said the WHO’s comments were “fundamentally flawed.” “The exceptional growth of next generation devices offers the WHO a real opportunity to tackle combustible consumption once and for all,” he said.

    “Over 100 million ex-smokers use reduced-risk products and the WHO should be taking advantage of massive investment in the sector by encouraging governments to provide an incentivized regulatory framework to enable greater expansion.”

    David Jones MP, who sits on the U.K. All Party Parliamentary Group for Smoking and Health, described the WHO’s opposition to all smoking alternatives, not just vaping, as “bizarre.”

    “Our advice remains that people who smoke are better to switch completely to vaping,” he said. “That opinion, however, is not shared by the WHO, which has long pursued an almost pathological campaign against e-cigarettes.”

  • WHO Details “Industry Attempts to Avoid Regulation”

    WHO Details “Industry Attempts to Avoid Regulation”

    Photo: Olrat

    The World Health Organization has published a report detailing what it describes as attempts by manufacturers to avoid regulation of e-cigarettes and heated-tobacco products.

    Titled “Litigation relevant to regulation of novel and emerging nicotine and tobacco products: comparison across jurisdictions,” the report offers governments examples of the legal arguments that the industry has used in attempts to minimize regulation as well as how courts have addressed those arguments.

    The emergence of products such as heated-tobacco products (HTPs) and electronic nicotine-delivery systems (ENDS) and their market growth has raised questions about how they should be regulated and how that regulation might affect comprehensive tobacco control.

    The WHO previously published its position on regulation of these products but has not addressed legal issues, such as how those regulations are being challenged in different jurisdictions. The new report and the accompanying case summaries close this gap and provide the facts, discussion of legal issues, arguments advanced and the reasoning of the courts.

    The key messages highlighted in the publication are:

    • ENDS and HTP manufacturers attempt to avoid products being regulated so as to fall within regulatory or legislative gaps.
    • Manufacturers can be expected to deploy arguments concerning the relative risk of different product categories and the need for coherent regulation along a continuum of risk.
    • Not all courts are receptive to arguments about relative risk, either because regulations are justified by reference to absolute risk or because the concept of relative risk must be judged at the population level and taking into account factors beyond relative toxicity.
    • Technological advances employed for the manufacture of novel and emerging nicotine and tobacco products will raise questions of whether a product falls within the ambit of the national legislation of the country.
    • There are relatively few cases addressing misleading marketing of ENDS, or enforcing restrictions on advertising, promotion and sponsorship, but important cases have been decided, including on how social media posts may constitute advertising and on whether advertising of an HTP device also constitutes advertising of a tobacco product.
  • WHO Reiterates its Opposition to Harm Reduction

    WHO Reiterates its Opposition to Harm Reduction

    Photo: Olrat

    In the runup to World No Tobacco day on May 31, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reasserted its abstinence-only approach to nicotine.

    In a May 19 press release titled “Quit tobacco to be a winner,” the WHO said that the tobacco industry has “promoted e-cigarettes as cessation aids under the guises of contributing to global tobacco control” while employing “strategic marketing tactics to hook children on this same portfolio of products, making them available in over 15,000 attractive flavors.”

    The agency also insisted that the scientific evidence on e-cigarettes as cessation aids was inconclusive, and that “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 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “E-cigarettes generate toxic chemicals, which have been linked to harmful health effects such as cardiovascular disease and lung disorders.”

    We must be guided by science and evidence, not the marketing campaigns of the tobacco industry.

    Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general, WHO

    The global health body also reiterated its commitment to excluding the tobacco industry from the debate through article 5.3 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

    “The tobacco industry is the single greatest barrier to reducing deaths caused by tobacco use,” the WHO wrote. “Their interests are irreconcilably opposed to promoting public health and point to a critical need to keep them out of global tobacco control efforts.”

    The organization also cited the United Nations Global Compact, which banned the tobacco industry from participation in 2017. “In line with Article 5.3, industry has been entirely excluded from the UN system and its agencies have been urged to devise strategies to prevent industry interference,” the WHO wrote.

  • UKVIA Condemns WHO Stance on Vaping Products

    UKVIA Condemns WHO Stance on Vaping Products

    John Dunne (Photo: UKVIA)

    The U.K. Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) has joined the chorus of voices condemning the World Health Organization (WHO) for its urging of countries to take an aggressive anti vaping stance ahead of a crucial health summit later this year.

    According to leaked documents reported in the Daily Express, the WHO plans to use November’s COP9 summit in the Netherlands as a platform to tell leading international health figures that e-cigarettes are as dangerous as smoking tobacco.

    The UKVIA joins the criticism of the WHO by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) Chair Mark Pawsey MP, who has called into question why the U.K. government is continuing to fund the body to the tune of £340 million ($471.8 million) over the next four years.

    The UKVIA notes that this action flies in the face of the scientific reality of vaping in the U.K., which has seen millions of people quit smoking in recent years. Research by British scientists has consistently shown vaping to be the most popular and successful aide to quitting smoking.

    The Cochrane Review into e-cigarettes highlights that existing studies show that vaping is nearly 50 percent more effective in helping smokers quit cigarettes than other methods of smoking cessation, according to the UKVIA. The review found that as many as 11 percent of smokers using a nicotine e‐cigarette to stop smoking might successfully stop compared to only 6 percent of smokers using nicotine‐replacement therapy or nicotine‐free e‐cigarettes or 4 percent of people having no support or behavioral support only.

    The vaping industry here in the U.K., together with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Vaping, is right to call out these baseless attacks on the sector.

    John Dunne

    There are already 3.2 million adults in Great Britain who have made the switch from smoking. The vaping industry needs to be supported as a British success and able to assist the remaining 6.9 million adult smokers in the U.K., according to the UKVIA.

    “The stance of the World Health Organization is extremely concerning,” said John Dunne, UKVIA director general, in a statement. “The vaping industry here in the U.K., together with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Vaping, is right to call out these baseless attacks on the sector. Vaping is a great British success story, enabling millions of people to switch from smoking.

    “The APPG is also right to call for the U.K. government to reconsider the level of its funding to the World Health Organization in light of these reports. Thankfully, now that the U.K. has left the EU, it is now longer bound by the ridiculous and quite frankly dangerous WHO messaging urging the bloc to treat vaping in the same way as smoking.”

  • WHO Advises Countries to Ban Open System Devices

    WHO Advises Countries to Ban Open System Devices

    Photo: Vaperesso

    Vapor advocates have expressed concern about recent recommendations made by the World Health Organization (WHO) study group on Tobacco Product Regulations to prohibit electronic nicotine and non-nicotine delivery systems where the user can control device features and liquid ingredients. The WHO has also called for a ban on vaping systems that have a higher “abuse liability” than conventional cigarettes, for example by controlling the emission rate or flux of nicotine.

    Clive Bates

    Clive Bates, a tobacco harm expert and former director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), called the advice irresponsible and bizarre. “If governments take it seriously, they will be protecting the cigarette trade, encouraging smoking and adding to a huge toll of cancer, heart and lung disease,” he said.

    The U.K. Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) said the WHO is out of touch with growing evidence on the public health potential of vaping. “Certain WHO positions are now so out of date, and so thoroughly refuted by the experts, that they may as well be saying the earth is flat,” said John Dunne, director general at the UKVIA, in a statement. “They deviate dramatically from leading experts, including Public Health England and Action on Smoking and Health.”

    Dunne cited the WHO’s assertion that there is “little evidence” for vaping’s role in helping people quit smoking. As early as 2019 clinical trials were finding vaping to be almost twice as effective as nicotine replacement therapy, he noted.

    This month, Public Health England (PHE) found in its Vaping Evidence Review 2021 that smoking quit rates involving a vaping product were higher than with any other method in every single English region.

    John Dunne

    “For the WHO to hold such contrary views is either bad science or bad faith. Both risk it becoming an enemy of harm-reduction,” said Dunne.

    “Vaping’s success as an industry, and its potential for public health improvements, is built on empowering personal choice,” he added. “Different systems, styles and flavors give consumers the options they need to leave combustible cigarettes behind. I would urge the WHO to engage with vapers, to hear their stories and discover the life-changing decisions they’ve made in their lives. Prohibition is simply not the answer.”

    The WHO is scheduled to hold a summit on vaping, during the Conference of Parties to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (COP9) in The Hague in November 2021. Following its exit from the European Union, the U.K. will send a national delegation the meeting. The UKVIA was among expert guests invited by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Vaping to advise on the COP9 delegation’s approach.

    “The UK has a genuine opportunity to promote harm-reduction as a valid, progressive strategy for public health on the world stage,” said Dunne. “We must not allow misinformation to undermine this potential, irrespective of the source.”