Conflicts of interest, a pervasive bias and corruption at the heart of the European Commission’s tobacco and nicotine policy guidance document
In Part 1, we looked at how the European Commission tender for a Single Framework Contract for Support Actions in the Field of Tobacco Control, the main source of policy guidance for the upcoming revision of the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive, was badly managed and should have been rerun.
The report produced based on its recommendations points clearly to a ban of all flavours in vapes, a complete ban of nicotine pouches, and plain packaging for any other safer nicotine product currently on the market.
We looked at how the consortium partners were essentially representing the views of an American billionaire. Today, we’ll examine the conflicts of interest of the consortium members and how this manifested in the process that led to the report.
A clear conflict of interest
Members of the consortium which produced what we’re calling the Bloomberg Report – which charts how the EU Commission will try to steer nicotine policy – have strong views against the use of nicotine products like vapes and pouches as smoking cessation strategies.
The European Network for Smoking Prevention (ENSP) is an activist NGO running a campaign against alternative nicotine products. Vital Strategies, is an openly declared anti-vaping advocacy group. They exist to implement Michael Bloomberg’s global strategy against safer nicotine products.
In other words, members of the consortium that received €3,000,000 to advise European officials on their nicotine products policy had glaring conflicts of interest. When confronted by this in a question in the European Parliament, the Commission replied that the members all signed documents (declaration on honour) declaring they would remain impartial and objective in their advice.
The Ombudsman investigates
The tobacco industry flagged this to the European Ombudsman which opened an investigation: a serious step in and of itself, given the political pressure it was likely under to ignore the whole issue.
And indeed, members of the consortium had signed a declaration about conflicts of interest, where they declared that its staff members “have not…had any professional involvement in any project related to tobacco in the last four years”. It seems unlikely that staff members at an organisation called the European Network on Smoking Prevention, for example, had no professional involvement in tobacco in the four years prior to the signing of the contract.
Indeed, Clearing the Air found evidence that ENSP was actively lobbying DG Sante on tobacco and nicotine issues while it was under contract to produce the report on revising the EU’s tobacco control laws; a clear and flagrant breach of the rules on conflicts of interest.
So why lie about it?
The Commission’s guidance states that a conflict of interest exists where the ‘impartial and objective exercise of the functions of a financial actor or other person…is compromised for reasons involving family, emotional life, political or national affinity, economic interest or any other direct or indirect personal interest.’ Conflicts of interest can also result from “involvement with non-governmental…organisations”.
Someone should probably have mentioned that to Cornel Radu-Loghin, the head of ENSP who told Euractiv that, as an NGO, the very concept of a conflict of interest is not applicable.
“Not very satisfactory”
“Not very satisfactory” was how the European Ombudsman’s team described how DG Santé responded to allegations of a conflict of interest in opening their investigation, noting that there were “legitimate concerns as to the partiality and capacity of the NGO to deliver a fair and unbiased assessment”. The clue is in the name, really. An NGO called “the European Network on Smoking Prevention” is unlikely to be any more “impartial and objective” when looking at future policy on smoking than big tobacco.
“We should be mindful of the reputational risk in this case”, the Ombudsman noted, “[w]hile the complaint is brought by a tobacco lobby…NGOs are still subject to COI [conflict of interest] rules and the Commission needs to ensure that its work on such topics is not biased and that the rules have been applied…This is particularly true with alternative tobacco products such as e-cigarettes”.
ENSP has strong views on “alternative tobacco products”. It has adopted a “clear position against all nicotine and tobacco products…and publicly lobbied to restrict these products”, according to the Ombudsman.
And that is where the problem lies.
The science on cigarettes is settled: smoking kills you and you should stop doing it. Even big tobacco – after much soul searching – finally decided to concede that point.
But the science on “alternative” products – vapes, nicotine pouches and so on – is hotly contested. Tobacco control allies of yesteryear now fight tooth and nail over whether safer nicotine products are the solution to the smoking epidemic or a menace to be stamped out.
It shouldn’t be. We know beyond any doubt that safer nicotine products are indeed a lot safer. Any impartial examination of the topic would have come to the same conclusions as the British, French and German governments have: smoking kills you, safer nicotine products don’t, and it makes sense for people to move from one to the other.
Consulting “far and wide”
In its proposal, the consortium claimed their data collection tools would be “surveys and interviews, literature review, public consultation, automated language processing, econometric models, workshops.”
For the authors of the European Commission’s main tobacco and nicotine products guidance document to be objective in their data collection, this would imply that they would consult a wide range of stakeholders, including those active in promoting tobacco harm reduction via safer nicotine products, or those campaigning to use these products to promote smoking cessation.
There are plenty of them around, and the Commission paid three million euros for this consortium to prepare the most comprehensive report on the widest range of stakeholders. So who did they ask?
An online group with 39 of the leading European pro-tobacco harm reduction consultants and academics was asked if any of them were indeed consulted by the consortium running the European Commission’s €3 million project. These experts are easy to find: most of them speak frequently at conferences, presenting and publishing their research on the effectiveness of vaping and nicotine pouches in reducing the harmful effects of smoking.
It seems, though, that not a single one of the 39 experts were consulted by any of the activist groups charged with providing the European Commission with a wide range of expert advice.
We asked the 39 experts if they knew anyone in their networks who was approached to give evidence to the European Commission policy consultation group. We could only find a few consumer organisations. And here, it gets curious.
Pro THR participants we spoke to say they were made to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before being consulted. Consumer associations make their positions public, so there was no reason for an NDA to protect this stakeholder group.
Rather, the NDA seems to have been meant to protect the EU taxpayer funded consortium. If the association presented the EU policy advisers with important information and data on how tobacco harm reduction strategies have been effective in reducing tobacco-related deaths, and the consortium chose to ignore this information in their report to the European Commission, the NDA would protect the policy consultants and NGOs from any charges of a dereliction of duty given their declaration on honour.
At the final stakeholder meeting – called a “validation workshop” held by Open Evidence the antis and the pros were separated in zoom breakout rooms and were not given the opportunity to discuss the findings with each other. “It was essentially two echo chambers”, one person present told us.
Although the €3 million taxpayer funded consortium signed a declaration on honour to not allow the evident bias of their years of activist campaigning to pollute the openness of their policy advice, it seems that they only consulted a handful of stakeholder groups – and seemingly none of the academics – they disagreed with. And only then on the condition that consumers were muffled and could not make public the information they gave researchers.
A Biased and Corrupt Report
The report upon which the European Commission will base its regulatory decisions on whether to promote or restrict safer nicotine products like e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches is biased and corrupted.
It is clear, from the cavalier attitude of the Commission, that the evidence pointing to mismanagement and corner-cutting don’t matter. When the aggrieved party is industry – even worse, Big Tobacco – they do what they want and ignore any criticism or evidence: anyone who would speak up would be an obvious shill.
Would the European Ombudsman or the European Commission Secretariat General so easily look away at such transgressions if it pertained to policy guidance on workers’ rights or environmental protection? Where’s the outrage from anti-business NGOs like Corporate Europe Observatory, always quick to call out organisations who they don’t like for their lies, but silent when it comes to the transgressions of others in their close-knit circle of publicly financed NGOs?.
Hypocrisy 101: rules and processes only matter if we get the outcome we want. Policy based evidence, not evidence based policy. And now the EU Commissioner in charge of tobacco and nicotine reforms is busy lying about safer nicotine products, telling anyone who listens that he thinks they are just as dangerous as cigarettes.
Everything this report says lacks any credibility, coming from a biased process, written by a biased team with clear conflicts of interest, backed by the narrow interests of a single American billionaire and spearheaded by a Commissioner who is brazenly lying to our faces about relative risk. The only sensible thing for policymakers to do with it involves a shredder and a waste paper basket.
David Zaruk is an environmental-health risk analyst with over 30 years experience on European policy issues. He is the editor of The Firebreak and also publishes as The Risk-Monger.
