It’s been a bust few weeks in the world of safer nicotine products, what with Australia’s effective prohibition, some European country urging a continent wide flavour ban, and Sweden going the other way and implementing harm-based taxation.
In amongst all of these, we haven’t put out an update on our series on prohibitionists getting owned by Community Notes in a while.
That doesn’t mean it’s stopped happening, as today’s offerings will show.
WHO goes off the deep end, claiming vapes are “designed to kill”
OK, so we’re all fairly numb to the WHO telling outright lies about vaping by now. That’s not a good thing: at some point, WHO officials will want people to follow other public health rules. Staying indoors during a pandemic, for instance. So the loss of trust - and loss of face - WHO seems to be imposing on itself through its oft called-out lies on X, could have very real consequences.
This time, they’ve gone all in, claiming that vapes are “designed to kill” while citing no evidence whatsoever.
This is clearly nonsense and it’s difficult to know where to begin in rebutting it. But community notes certainly tried, simply by telling the truth: “Vapes were designed as a smoking cessation device and are vastly safer than smoking. Banning vapes increases smoking rates”.
There then follows lots of high quality, independent science backing this point up, none of which will be read by any of the ideological bureaucrats in Geneva putting out this nonsense:
WHO official - and former Russian Foreign Service employee - quotes WHO head’s falsehoods
Dr Alexey Kulikov isn’t new to this column, but just like his employers, it seems that he doesn’t mind being called out by Community Notes. According to his LinkedIn page, Kulikov spent seven years working for Sergey Lavrov in the Russian foreign service before joining WHO. We’ll just leave it there.
In this post, Kulikov makes a number of evidence free statements about vaping, but one that stood out is his assertion that the tobacco industry invented vaping.
It is fairly easy to Google this one and discover that modern vapes weren’t dreamed up by anyone over in “Big Tobacco”, but by a Chinese chemist named Hon Lik, who lost his father to a smoking related disease. But why let facts get in the way of your chosen narrative, eh?
This lie, as well as many others Kulikov floats in the post, are well refuted by Community Notes, who make it clear that the WHO is “not telling the truth about vaping at all”.
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Obvious astroturfing - WHO asks “a youth” for their perspective. Youth turns out to be a spin doctor for Tobacco Control group.
We thought we’d end on this one as those of us who think giving smokers safer nicotine products is a good idea are oftent accused of “astroturfing”: where supposedly neutral figures get involved in a campaign “spontaneously”, when in reality they are paid advocates for one side.
This usually manifests itself in accusations that vapers are in some way “front groups” for big tobacco, when most are just passionate advocates doing it in their spare time.
Bear this in mind when we listen to this “youth perspective”, publicized by the X account of WHO’s Europe office. The video itself is full of the usual half-truths and misinformation that we’ve come to expect from WHO, and these are called out in the ensuing Community note.
But what’s interesting is that the post fails to mention that the “youth” in question is actually a communications Manger at the European Network for Smoking Prevention which - despite its name - seems to dedicate most of its time to calling for bans on products that are not smoked at all.
The post was swiftly called out by Community Notes, but it’s worth considering what might happen if this were the other way around, and a pro harm-reduction outfit tried to cast an employee of big tobacco as an independent voice.
