E-Cigarette Summit: Countries urged to support risk-proportionate strategies to regulate harmful products
By Omotayo Edubi
Clive Bates, Director, Counterfactual Consulting, has encouraged governments and the local medical communities to consider supporting risk-proportionate strategies to regulate harmful products in the tobacco industry.
Bates said this in a webinar lecture titled: The new tobacco wars, at the Virtual 2021 E-Cigarette Summit in UK.
Bates said that there are a lot of scientific innovations that are desperately searching for harm in the tobacco control community.
He said, “The way I see a lot of scientific innovations that is coming out of the tobacco control community, it is a kind of desperate search for harm.
“I think the reason for that is without science, there wouldn’t be a tobacco control, and it would be like coffee or caffeine.
“We’re seeing a number of abuses now that I think are involved in that pursuit. The first is terrible use of toxicology. For example, tiny traces of metals being tucked up into significant health risk.
“Above all, I think the biggest problem is in this one, which is the abuse of correlation and causation.”
In elaborating on how Tobacco Harm Reduced (THR) products can be regulated, Bates said, “If regulation makes vape less accessible or acceptable, more expensive, less consumer friendly, pharmacologically less effective and inhibits innovations, then the regulations can cause harm by perpetuating smoking.
“A risk-proportionate approach is required, which means that regulators impose restrictions in proportion to the risk to health, posed by the product.”
He said that 68 people have died and 2,800 persons were hospitalized in an outbreak of severe lung episodes concentrated in North America.
“This outbreak was consistent with localized supply chain contamination. In other words, it rose and then fell short.
“It involved supply chain contamination, bit of mini acetate, contaminating the supply chain for cannabis and illicit cannabis vapes.
“It was nothing to do with nicotine, nothing at all. Yet a large campaign was put in place deliberately. In my view to conflate these two things, it is sad to say it worked. We now have this in the United Kingdom, not even the country where it happened.
“There was a surge in people who thought that vaping was as harmful or more harmful than smoking up to a third in Britain and a contraction in the number of people who rightly think it was much less.
“At the end, assumption that new technologies carry unknown risks guide much of the debate and it is often amplified to levels that overshadow the dangers of known risks.
“That is why we will prevail in the end because the underlying benefits of these technologies will prevail. And all of this noise and vitriol will subside, be forgotten, and we will have a more sensible way of using nicotine,” Bates added.
