David Zaruk (aka the Risk Monger) has been an EU risk and science communications specialist since 2000, active in EU policy events from REACH and SCALE to the Pesticides Directive. He is the editor of The Firebreak. He recently published an investigation into Michael Bloomberg’s undue influence on tobacco control policy.
So we loved – and indeed covered – your investigation into how Mike Bloomberg underwrites the global tobacco control movement. How did you become interested in it.
The entire tobacco harm reduction sphere is dealing with the rather heavy-weighted influence of one particular person, Michael Bloomberg. He has spent $1.6 billion on fighting tobacco harm reduction. And if you start to map out what exactly he’s done with that, it’s really quite a fascinating list of organizations, most of which are created by him. They’re all operating on what is of interest to Michael Bloomberg and nothing else.
He then intertwines all of these organisations, and everyone has to stay on the same hymn sheet if they want to continue getting paid. He’ll start with either the Bloomberg Family Foundation, which is part of Bloomberg Philanthropies. In the case of tobacco harm reduction, they fund the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, one organization. That then funds the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which in turn funds the Global Health Advocacy Incubator GHAI). GHAI then makes grants to multiple different organisations.
The net result is that it looks like there is a whole civil society ecosystem lined up against tobacco harm reduction. But in fact it all flows back to Michael Bloomberg and his personal views. If we follow the money where it started – from the Bloomberg Foundation – and understand that each of these layers of advocacy groups takes a commission for their management of the funds, you begin to understand how it is that there is the illusion of a “broad” coalition.
So it looks less like philanthropy and more like a commercial arrangement?
It’s even more crude than that. If you’re spending $200 million on a campaign, what’s a couple million between us to pay the salaries of the top directors in the organization? Most of the directors that I could find IRS 990 forms for, which is the American tax declaration for nonprofits, in particular, receive an average of $25,000 US dollars a month in salary. Some of them are above $350,000 a year for salary.
If you’re working in an NGO and you’re getting $25,000 a month, that’s not bad money. And it’s funny to see how people campaign against politicians who don’t receive anywhere near that amount of money and talk about waste. This applies to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and the guy at Vital Strategies is making north of $600,000.
But these guys don’t have any say over the message?
The other thing that Bloomberg does quite a bit is go around and make sure that he gets the recognition when his philanthropies launch a new initiative. He, of course, lauds his titles. We cringe when Donald Trump does it. But Michael Bloomberg, of course, will tell you that he’s a WHO ambassador. He’s a climate ambassador. He seems to need some sense of legitimacy on the world stage. And so he’s buying it.
But he also does things which are quite mischievous and not at all transparent or ethical.For example, he creates groups that have names and function like NGOs, but they don’t exist. For example, the Tobacco Control Research Group. They were one of the accepted organizations at the COP 11 in Geneva on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. But it does not exist as an entity. So as strict as the COP 11 procedures supposedly are for who can and cannot attend, if Michael Bloomberg says this group exists, they exist.
Essentially, Bloomberg gives the money to the University of Bath, and University of Bath pays their researchers. But when they act outside, they act as representatives of this non-existent group. Why is this a little bit disingenuous? Well, because if we ever wanted to know how much money was being given to these groups, or if there are any conflicts of interest, all we can find out is that these are researchers at the University of Bath. We don’t know anything else. He has also done the same with Beyond Plastics, a phantom NGO run out of tiny Bennington College.
So a lot of your work is a critique of the precautionary principle, which is often cited when the EU regulates safer nicotine products. What is the precautionary principle, and why in your view is it so flawed?
There are quite a few definitions flying about. The one used at the EuropeanCommission at the moment – and the one that’s the most dangerous – was pioneered by David Gee when he was at the European Environment Bureau. It essentially reverses the burden of proof, which means that unless you can prove with certainty that something is completely safe, you cannot put it on the market.
That seems okay until you think, well, what is safe? Safe for you may not be safe for somebody else. A scientist never uses the word safe because even water, technically speaking, is not safe. Precaution in this context is not risk management. It’s uncertainty management.
Another definition, which may be a little more sensible, is what’s known as the Brundtland definition, which goes back to the Rio Earth Summit in ’92, and that is known as a triple negative.
In essence, it says “just because you’re not sure, that’s not a reason to delay taking action on something”. At the time, there was the question of climate change. They weren’t sure if CO2 emissions were tied to climate change. But the catastrophic risks that the world faced was enough to decide to take precautions on fossil fuels despite the lack of certainty.
Now you can apply that definition in reverse to something like vaping. Even if you’re not 100% sure of the safety of some of the ingredients or mechanisms used in vaping, given the known harms from tobacco, the unknowns about vaping are no reason to ban it given the alternative. Whereas the European Commission definition would say that because we can’t be 100% sure vaping is safe, we can’t allow it on the market.
So there’s this tension between the Commission definition and the Brundtland definition. How has that played out in practice?
Toxicologists will always tell you that the dose makes the poison. One aspirin can do a lot of good but 100 not so much good. Based on that you can have a basic risk management strategy. That works for chemists and for chemistry. It doesn’t work in other fields of science, like biology, where they take a more hazard based approach where exposure levels are not taken into account. A hazard based approach simply goes back again to the David Gee definition of precaution, and the best example, I think, was the Sustainable Use Directive on pesticides which said that if you can’t prove that something is safe with certainty, you had to take your pesticide off the market.
So we’re systematically removing products from the market now. No new pesticides are going on the market and farmers are losing valuable tools. And then it got even more complicated when the Commission said “by the way, you have to also prove that it’s not an endocrine disruptor” [a chemical that mimics endocrine hormones]. Well, coffee is an endocrine disruptor. In fact, defining an endocrine disruptor on its own is pretty hard to do.
What’s the outcome of that for farmers?
Well, they’re running out of crop protection tools. There are no new products coming on the market, and most products that come up for re-authorization cannot be proven safe with absolute certainty. Companies like Corteva, one of the largest agritech companies, are separating their seeds business from their pesticides business. Not only is there no future for them in pesticides, they see huge activist funded lawsuits coming in. They’re trying to link autism to pesticides because, well, we have somebody in the US government who’s very interested in that sort of stuff.
