It is widely recognized that the World Health Organization (WHO) failed miserably to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak. Despite reports of the virus escaping the confines of China, it was not until mid-March 2020 that the WHO finally conceded that widespread community transmission was occurring and officially declared a pandemic. In fact, the WHO tweeted in Jan. 2020 that COVID couldn’t be transmitted between people.
The United Nations agency has never acknowledged its incompetence during that time and has been justifiably criticized as a result. It is now engaged in further destroying its credibility with a bizarre, ideological, and politically motivated attack on products that can help reduce the toll of combustible tobacco use worldwide.
Arguably, smoking is much more damaging to global public health than COVID. The WHO’s own figures estimate that nearly seven million have died from COVID complications in the four years since the pandemic struck, but eight million people die of smoking-related diseases every year.
A bizarre, recently released WHO press release attempts to gaslight governments into banning e-cigarettes, which have been proven to reduce smoking rates around the world. In that report, the WHO peddles demonstrably false claims about their use.
It is not the first time the WHO has done this. In Jan. 2020, as it was clear that countries outside of China were reporting COVID cases, the WHO spent its time publishing a series of 14 tweets about the dangers of vaping. These falsehoods included bogus claims such as e-cigarette liquid being highly inflammable and that secondhand vapor is lethal to bystanders, both of which are entirely false.
Now, the WHO is recommending that governments ban vaping products, but not cigarettes, which are far more harmful. The full report contains heroic cherry-picking of research including claims that “e-cigarettes are harmful,” which fails to recognize the relative risk of vapor products being orders of magnitude less harmful than combustible tobacco. There is no indication or justification as to why the WHO is intent on protecting sales of cigarettes by recommending prohibition or medicalization of their competition.
The WHO also claims that “electronic cigarettes as actually used in the population as consumer products have not been proven to be effective for cessation at the population level” which is simply untrue.
The Cochrane Library (the gold standard of evidence reviews) concluded in Nov. 2022 that “[t]here is high-certainty evidence that [e-cigarettes] with nicotine increase [smoking] quit rates compared to [nicotine replacement therapy].” In countries with liberal regulation towards vaping, smoking has been found to decline twice as fast as the global average, and vaping is recommended by the National Health Service in the UK for smokers looking to quit.
The WHO claims that flavored vapes are solely aimed at youth. But flavors play a key role in product use initiation, as they are often cited as the one of the reasons for adults to switch to vaping instead of combustible tobacco. It further claims that elements in e-cigarette aerosol “are known to cause cancer and increase the risk of heart and lung disorders” but fail to tell the truth that they are in such low doses that they are not at a level which would harm anyone’s health. It further implies that vapor and tobacco smoke are similarly harmful to bystanders, which relies on one study from 2016 that says nothing of the sort.
The picture painted by the WHO’s delusional report is that vaping products are a serious threat to health and should be prohibited despite global scientific consensus that they are orders of magnitude less harmful than combustible tobacco.
In echoes of its fantasy COVID-era tweets from 2020, the WHO is further embarrassing itself on social media by claiming vaping can “lead to learning disorders.” There is no evidence whatsoever for that and their claim that vaping is a gateway to smoking for young people has been comprehensively debunked by respected scientific researchers in the U.K. and U.S.
The WHO’s stance on vaping has no basis in science and betrays its allegiance to sinister vested interests and corporate pressure. It is targeting its attacks on far safer alternatives to smoking while seemingly forgetting that its role is supposed to be to reduce the toll of eight million deaths from combustible tobacco use.
It pretends to be oblivious to the fact that vaping displaces smoking in both adult and adolescent populations and endorses prohibition as if there is no evidence that such policies always fail. To do so, it promotes fake news and cherry-picked research about vaping from authors with significant conflicts of interests and presents them without context of the massively reduced risk of death and disease compared to smoking.
The U.S. is the largest contributor to WHO funding. This should be re-evaluated if the organization continues to operate in such a blatantly irresponsible and anti-scientific manner.
Martin Cullip is an International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.