NEWS
SPOTLIGHT: HEALTH GROUPS PROFITING FROM ANTI-VAPING MESSAGE?
Report suggests
collusion among US
public health, anti-
tobacco groups and
federal government
By Gordon Stribling
A new report suggests that some US public health
bodies, federal government and anti-tobacco groups
may have orchestrated a coordinated anti-vaping
campaign.
“There are hundreds, thousands of people who are
working and being paid to basically kill the e-cigarette
industry which will basically kill a lot of adult smokers,”
the report’s author Michelle Minton told Regulator Watch
in an interview.
Minton, a senior fellow specialising in consumer policy at
the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noticed a contrast
between the stories about a teen vaping epidemic
circulating in the media and the actual research data,
which she says only points to a small percentage of
teens experimenting with e-cigarettes.
“It didn’t in my mind rise to the level of panic I was seeing
in newspapers [and] on blogs.”
Minton spoke to health departments and began looking
at the actions of the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) and academics and concluded
that they were in constant communication with one
another. Rather than being truly independent, they were,
she said, ‘deeply financially-interwoven.’
“The ‘A-ha! moment’ was when I realised that the Florida
Public Health Department had petitioned the federal
government for a big grant for their operations and
had listed the ACS [American Cancer Society] as their
contractor to carry it out,” she added.
“The project would actually be housed at the ACS
building in Florida and members of ACS would be paid
by the Department of Health as employees.”
The author behind the report has also said that most
people in the US are unaware that the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) is comprised of separate entities that all
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have to compete for a slice of the budget.
“The better case they can make that something is a
huge threat, the more money they can get,” according
to Minton.
While public health departments and organisations
compete for NIH grants, ‘private’ non-profits such as
Truth Initiative and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
(CTFK) conduct government business as contractors,
according to the author.
“These groups then lobby the federal government and
say, ‘Hey, we think the National Cancer Institute (NCI)
should get some more money because of this huge
problem,” Minton said.
“And then the NCI hands some of that money over to
these groups. So, it’s a nice little circle that they’re all
working together to sustain their campaigns.”
While the exact figure is unknown, Minton believes that
‘billions’ is spent on fighting vaping, a sizeable chunk
of it funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
(RWJF), a founder of CTFK and the philanthropic arm of
Nicorette-manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson.
She believes the foundation donates hundreds of
millions of dollars each year to universities, individual
researchers and the ACS, who then fund more groups
who coordinate their efforts to fight e-cigarettes.
Minton said she found what she believes to be collusion
between the organisations to be ‘disturbing’.
“You have the FDA citing CTFK, Truth and researchers
at the NIH citing these studies that they have funded and
then news media reports [that] ‘there’s a new study, CDC
says this’ and they are citing all of these people.
“It appears as if it’s a groundswell of independent groups
that are saying the same thing, that e-cigarettes are
dangerous, they’re hooking our kids, they’re going to kill
our kids.