WHO FCTC: WHO FCTC Page 2

By Jonathan On Jul 5, 2017

Anti-tobacco treaty labelled toothless

The WHO Attempts To Censor Websites
23 June 2014
By Dick Puddlecote
As well as being entirely unelected, it appears that the World Health Organisation also doesn’t care much for openness and transparency.
Rumours have reached Puddlecote Towers that the WHO is spitting blood about a leaked document from a November 2013 meeting being widely discussed, and is busily putting the frighteners on those who are discussing it. They are not happy with minutes which mention that the WHO views e-cigarettes as a threat – and which prompted a much-reported recent letter to the WHO by over 50 health professionals – reaching the internet, so are doing their best to make the document disappear.
It was leaked to the Financial Times in April and has been quoted on a number of sites including Clive Bates’s blog a few days later. Now, however, I understand the WHO are issuing legal letters demanding the minutes be removed and ordering the site owners not to make any reference to the minutes or to quote from them.
In case you’re curious, this is the document in question, with paragraphs 11, 23 and 69-75 the parts that the WHO would prefer you didn’t know about until they pursue classifying e-cigs as tobacco products in Moscow in November.

Even for a tobacco control industry known for its many dubious and borderline corrupt practices, I find this arrogant, sinister and soviet-like harassment absolutely staggering.
Still, I suppose it proves that the ideas discussed were not just idle chit-chat, and that the WHO are deadly serious about doing their damnedest to eradicate e-cigs, eh? As such, I’d urge you to have a good read of the relevant paragraphs for a glimpse of what these unelected supranational bureaucrats have planned for later this year.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/230992926/WHO-Leaked-Document-about-E-Cigs

So now e-cigarettes are tobacco products AND medicines?!
14 APRIL 2014
by Christopher Snowdon
From the Financial Times… Electronic cigarette users are set to be banished to the pavement alongside their tobacco-smoking cousins – and face similar hefty prices – if the World Health Organisation pushes ahead with plans to regulate e-cigarettes in the same way as normal tobacco.
Leaked documents seen by the Financial Times revealed that parts of the WHO are keen to classify the battery-powered devices as tobacco under the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a WHO treaty that obliges governments to curtail smoking rates across the globe.
The forces ranged against e-cigarette users are endless and become less accountable at every turn. We have already been faced by the MHRA, the Department of Health and the European Commission. Now comes the World Health Organisation, an unelected body with strong financial links to the pharmaceutical industry which holds its meetings on tobacco in notorious secrecy.
Why, you may ask, has the Department of Health been conniving to have e-cigarettes regulated as medical products while the WHO is conniving to regulate them as tobacco products? Aren’t medicines at the opposite end of the spectrum to tobacco products?
Of course they are. It makes no sense at all until you consider that the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control can only be applied to tobacco whereas the MHRA only regulates medicines. Necessity is the mother of invention, hence the eager rush to pretend that e-cigarettes are something they not.
The WHO’s excuse for classifying e-cigs as tobacco products is that the nicotine in them comes from tobacco. But the nicotine in patches and gum also comes from tobacco. And whilst it is possible to artificially synthesise nicotine without using tobacco, it is much more expensive and the resulting fluid would be exactly the same. It is a risible justification.
The fact remains that e-cigarettes are neither tobacco products nor medicines. They are consumer products and should be regulated as such. They have nothing to do with the MHRA or the WHO. They have nothing to do with the corrupt ‘tobacco control’ lobby that has objected to them from the start because never featured in the prohibitionist blueprint.
Quite how the British government is going to square e-cigarettes being both medicines and tobacco products is a question for another day. On the plus side, very few of the signatories of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control have implemented all of the WHO’s recommendations. It can be ignored with apparent impunity. On the down side, the UK is one of those countries.
As difficult as it was for vapers to make the EU see some sense on this issue, the hardest task is yet to come. The WHO is completely outside the democratic process and answers only to itself. There is a long road ahead.

There’s a new dawn coming folks!
Smoking bans kill businesses
March 1, 2013
In a country that is showing severe signs of complete insanity which, bizarrely, is completely the fault of those that should know all about sanity – the health freaks – there has been a glimmer of hope that sanity may now be starting to spread.? We all know by now that smoking, drinking alcohol or gluttony is frowned upon from a great height by the new world rulers known as the World Health Organisation.? Now I am at odds with this, as you may well know by now, for if the figures from Africa are even remotely accurate then the 700,000 deaths supposedly caused by smoking in the EU bloc absolutely pale into insignificance next to the (minimum) “1 child every 3 seconds” of each day dying of malnutrition & disease in stricken Africa. One death per 30 seconds would equal 1,051,200 deaths per annum – so the WHO, yet again, only accord figures to the projects they wish to promote. Of course you also need to take into account the fact that African figures are helpless children.
Read more!

It really is a crock of …. !
12 November 2012
By Simple Simon
Tragically this week, in Seoul, South Korea, government representatives from 176 United Nations (UN) member-states will meet to discuss proposals ostensibly aimed at curbing tobacco use worldwide.I say tragically because Lord only knows what these lunatic tobacco haters will come up with! They will read Clive Bates open letter, consider the contents and then simply carry on with whatever they have already decided. For an unelected mob with no governmental powers they seem to creating havoc where-ever they tread a path with their tobacco eradication programmes.
They want to impose a tobacco tax, nothing new there then. But hang on a minute who the hell are the WHO to dictate that further taxes should be levied on smokers when much of that tax is to be directed toward…..the WHO! We already give these twerps $33m per annum, only to be pauperised as a thank you I would imagine that a certain blubbery creature by the name of Liam Donaldson
will be there: tobacco hater extraordinaire, the man that sold 25% of this country down the proverbial ‘swannee’ for his seat at the top table, the man that threw a hissy fit and threatened to resign if we were not lumbered with a total smoking ban-what joy, knowing that he will be there discussing the British smokers fate!
Read More.

Steer clear of Big Pharma, says… the WHO!
15 April 2011
From the BMJ:?
The World Health Organization has warned health professionals working in tobacco control not to become too closely involved with drug companies that produce smoking cessation products.
Well, well. This is a breath of fresh air. And it looks like the WHO picked a suitable audience for this message…
The warning came last month at a meeting on smoking prevention in Madrid that was hosted by the National Committee to Prevent Smoking, which represents most Spanish anti-tobacco organisations, and which was sponsored by Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and McNeil—all of which make treatments to help smoking cessation.
Let’s be clear on this. I have never had a problem with businesses lobbying or funding research, including pharmaceutical and tobacco companies. In fact, I would rather the government listens to people who have worked for a living than remain in the political echo chamber passing stupid and impractical laws.

Industry primarily represents its own self-interest, of course, but they represent the interests of their customers rather better than politicians represent the interests of the electorate. If we are being charitable, we might say that Big Pharma represents the interests of smokers who want state-funded pharmaceutical nicotine. Likewise—and I realise this is not a popular view these days—the tobacco industry’s desire to sell cigarettes more closely matches the desire of the millions of people who want to buy cigarettes than does the desire of the WHO to ban them.

The problem with Big Pharma’s role in tobacco control is two-fold. Firstly, it is blatantly hypocritical to ignore one industry while being hand in glove with another industry. Secondly, although the interests of Big Pharma are served by policies that have long since been decided on by tobacco control (smoking bans, higher tax on cigarettes, etc.), in several instances the influence of pharmaceutical companies results not just in damage to liberty but in damage to public health. For example, I do not believe that the ridiculous ban on snus would still be in place were it not for lobbying from Big Pharma at the EU and WHO level. At a national level, I doubt that ASH would be pushing Chantix quite so vigorously if Pfizer weren’t a constant presence at every conference they attend.

But more to the point, where does the World Health Organisation get off telling other people not to be too chummy with the pharmaceutical industry? Isn’t this the same organisation that welcomed Big Pharma as a partner in its tobacco control program with the barely ambiguous comment that “investing in health yields high returns”? This, from the Director-General of the WHO in 1999:
Three major pharmaceutical companies have joined this partnership: Glaxo Wellcome, Novartis, and Pharmacia & Upjohn. They all manufacture treatment products against tobacco dependence. Together, these companies will support a common goal that will have a significant impact on public health.

We are facing major health challenges. There is a real scope for meeting them. It is within our grasp to drastically reduce the global burden of disease. WHO is determined to do its part. And I am happy to welcome other stakeholders – and that includes industry – to join us – because investing in health yields high returns.

In the same year, Glaxo Wellcome’s director of Global Commercial Strategy explained what they wanted in return (link should be here but is broken):
We want to support and be partners in tobacco control in a number of areas. We could use help in the area of reimbursement.

By ‘reimbursement’, he means using taxpayers’ money to hand out free pharmaceutical nicotine products and that is exactly what the pharma-funded National Committee to Prevent Smoking has been lobbying for in Spain, as the BMJ notes:
In Spain public funding of drugs for smoking cessation is only provided in two autonomous communities: Navarra and La Rioja. Attempts by the National Committee to Prevent Smoking and some political parties—the conservative Popular Party and the Catalan nationalist Convergence and U nion party—to get the public funding of such drugs put into Spain’s new smoking law failed.
Rodrigo C?rdoba, spokesman for the National Committee to Prevent Smoking, denied that the committee had any conflict of interest, despite the fact that drug companies contributed to funding certain events. “We have tried by all means to maintain independence,” he said, in the face of pressure from the drug industry “to persuade us to support public funding [of drug therapies] in a more aggressive way.”

Some of the medical societies forming part of the committee had much “stronger links” to drug companies, he said. “There may be individual cases of conflict of interest. Clearly that has occurred and will still occur to some extent,” he added.”

No doubt it has and no doubt it will. It is good that the WHO is at least acknowledging this conflict of interest. Can we now expect the likes of ASH, the Roy Castle Lung Foundation and John Banbanbanzhaf—who are so quick to dismiss anything which has the slightest whiff of tobacco industry funding—to turn their back on pharmaceutical industry funding?

That was a rhetorical question, by the way.

**********************
BMJ 2011; 342:d2430 doi: 10.1136/bmj.d2430 (Published 14 April 2011)
Cite this as: BMJ 2011; 342:d2430
WHO warns anti-smoking campaigners not to become too close to drug firms
Aser Garc?a Rada
The World Health Organization has warned health professionals working in tobacco control not to become too closely involved with drug companies that produce smoking cessation products.
The warning came last month at a meeting on smoking prevention in Madrid that was hosted by the National Committee to Prevent Smoking, which represents most Spanish anti-tobacco organisations, and which was sponsored by Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and McNeil—all of which make treatments to help smoking cessation.
Armando Peruga, programme manager of WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative, advised health professionals “to be independent and guided by scientific evidence.”
“We have to keep a distance from the tobacco industry, but we also have to maintain some distance from any other industry that can have a commercial interest in this issue,” he said.

Obvious WHO bias

December 01, 2010

The anti-smoker brigade managed to get another scare headline into the news (“Secondhand Smoke Kills 600,000 a Year Worldwide, Study Says,” Nov. 26). Anyone taking time to read the article could quickly dispel the headline and the study. The story quotes a program manager at the World Health Organization’s Tobacco-Free Initiative, “who led the study.” Is this initiative capable of leading an unbiased study when its sole existence is an agenda?

The article also says, “Scientists then estimated … .” That is a misnomer. True scientists measure; “estimated” is not science. When a study is started to produce a specific result, then that study will conclude with the answer sought when estimates are used and nonsupporting data are ignored. The social engineering agenda of the World Health Organization should be exposed for what it is, controlling the masses through fear and fraud.

ROBERT GEHRMANN
Pennsylvania State Coordinator
Citizens Freedom Alliance/Smokers Club International
Crafton

In Flip, World Health Organization Claims Secondhand Smoke Kills
November 29, 2010
By Rush Limbaugh
“Secondhand smoke kills more than 600,000 people worldwide every year, according to a new study.? In the first look at the global impact of secondhand smoking, researchers analyzed data from 2004 for 192 countries. They found 40 percent of children and more than 30 percent of non-smoking men and women regularly breathe in secondhand smoke. … The study was paid for by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare and Bloomberg Philanthropies. … ‘This helps us understand the real toll of tobacco,’ said Armando Peruga, a program manager at the World Health Organization’s Tobacco-Free Initiative, who led the study. He said the approximately 603,000 deaths from secondhand smoking should be added to the 5.1 million deaths that smoking itself causes every year.”
Okay, now, we have in our archives, in our Essential Stack of Stuff at RushLimbaugh.com we have a World Health Organization study that was suppressed when it came out, but we have it, and I want Koko Jr. to link it on the home page today.? World Health Organization did a massive worldwide study of secondhand smoke, and they found it has no impact at all, zilch, zero, nada, and it was suppressed.? You can’t find it.? We have it, we kept it, we copied it ourselves, not relying on their websites.? I mean this is pure bunk.? All of this is just a crock.? I look at this kind of stuff, this debate’s been going on for 30 years.? I don’t know how many people have been around secondhand smoke all their lives.? It’s all lies.? It’s what the left does.? Lies about our lightbulbs, lies about global warming, and now lies about this, all for the express purpose of ending up controlling people’s lives.?
That report that I talked about, we first revealed it March 22nd of 2001, secondhand smoke is harmless.? “Passive Smoking Doesn’t Cause Cancer — Official.”? That’s the headline, and we’ll link to it.? It’s in our Essential Stack of Stuff, but we’ll make it prominent on our Web page this afternoon so that you can look it up tonight when you get around to it.?

David vs Goliath: Tobacconists Condemn Irresponsibility of W.H.O. Report on Smoking
December 10, 2009
Columbus, GA? December 10, 2009 – This week’s report by the World Health Organization regarding global tobacco use drew the ire of the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers, a U.S. based not-for-profit trade association of tobacconists.
The anti-smoking report was issued in Istanbul, Turkey by WHO, a ‘specialized agency’ of the United Nations. The agency receives more funding from the private sector than it does from the UN. Private sector funding of WHO includes pharmaceutical interests, including those that manufacture and sell smoking cessation products and benefit from anti-smoking efforts. WHO does not reveal its funding sources on its website.
“The WHO report is totally without credibility and is filled with wild, unsupportable claims,” said Chris McCalla, legislative director of the IPCPR which represents? some 2,000 small businesses that make, distributor or sell premium cigars, pipes, premium tobacco and related accoutrements.
“For us to take on WHO is like David taking on Goliath. We’re not ‘big tobacco’ and our mom-and-pop retail members are just small businesses selling legal products that adults enjoy like fine wine or top-shelf Scotch whiskey,” McCalla said, “but we cannot stand by while WHO makes outlandish and outrageous claims that are an affront to the intelligence of all thinking people,” he said.
McCalla chose not to repeat the controversial WHO claims so as not to give them further coverage. However, he explained that they had to do with alleged health issues related to smoking and secondhand smoke.
“They say there are no safe levels of secondhand smoke, but the Occupational Safety and Health Administration says otherwise,” McCalla explained. “OSHA has, indeed, set safe levels for secondhand smoke and those levels are 25,000 times higher than are found in bars and restaurants.”
Among contributors to WHO is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which, despite its support for WHO’s work with preventing and treating malaria, has been criticized by top WHO staffers for not allowing its funding to be more broadly spent.
“It’s all about money and power. WHO should stick to its work monitoring and treating infectious diseases. They certainly don’t know what they are talking about with regards to tobacco usage and smoking against which they suffer from terminal biases. What would you expect from an organization that refuses to hire people who smoke?” said McCalla.
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Contact:
Tony Tortorici
678/493-0313
tony@tortoricipr.com

WHO report “Passive smoking doesn’t cause cancer “

Because the U.K.’s Telegraph recently removed this official report, CTA has retained a copy on our website for your analysis.

Passive smoking doesn’t cause cancer – official

March 31, 2004
By Victoria Macdonald, Health Correspondent

THE world’s leading health organization has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect.

The astounding results are set to throw wide open the debate on passive smoking health risks. The World Health Organisation, which commissioned the 12-centre, seven-country European study has failed to make the findings public, and has instead produced only a summary of the results in an internal report.

Despite repeated approaches, nobody at the WHO headquarters in Geneva would comment on the findings last week. At its International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, which coordinated the study, a spokesman would say only that the full report had been submitted to a science journal and no publication date had been set.

The findings are certain to be an embarrassment to the WHO, which has spent years and vast sums on anti-smoking and anti-tobacco campaigns. The study is one of the largest ever to look at the link between passive smoking – or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) – and lung cancer, and had been eagerly awaited by medical experts and campaigning groups.

Yet the scientists have found that there was no statistical evidence that passive smoking caused lung cancer. The research compared 650 lung cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people. It looked at people who were married to smokers, worked with smokers, both worked and were married to smokers, and those who grew up with smokers.

The results are consistent with their being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer. The summary, seen by The Telegraph, also states: “There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood.”

A spokesman for Action on Smoking and Health said the findings “seem rather surprising given the evidence from other major reviews on the subject which have shown a clear association between passive smoking and a number of diseases.” Roy Castle, the jazz musician and television presenter who died from lung cancer in 1994, claimed that he contracted the disease from years of inhaling smoke while performing in pubs and clubs.

A report published in the British Medical Journal last October was hailed by the anti-tobacco lobby as definitive proof when it claimed that non-smokers living with smokers had a 25 per cent risk of developing lung cancer. But yesterday, Dr Chris Proctor, head of science for BAT Industries, the tobacco group, said the findings had to be taken seriously. “If this study cannot find any statistically valid risk you have to ask if there can be any risk at all. “It confirms what we and many other scientists have long believed, that while smoking in public may be annoying to some non-smokers, the science does not show that being around a smoker is a lung-cancer risk.” The WHO study results come at a time when the British Government has made clear its intention to crack down on smoking in thousands of public places, including bars and restaurants.

The Government’s own Scientific Committee on Smoking and Health is also expected to report shortly – possibly in time for this Wednesday’s National No Smoking day – on the hazards of passive smoking.

This report is obviously quite damaging to the “secondhand smoke is a deadly hazard” argument proliferated by the pharmaceutical industry (Nicoderm) funded smoking ban activists; which explains the reason, after years of this story being in the public domain, it was suddenly and inexplicably removed.

Tobacco treaty signers close to adopting measure

By Vinnee Tong
November 21, 2008

NEW YORK—Anti-tobacco activists said Friday that 160 countries that have signed a treaty to curb tobacco use were on the verge of adopting guidelines that say tobacco sellers’ interests conflict with public health.

Representatives of the countries met this week in Durban, South Africa, to determine what role, if any, tobacco companies will take in the implementation of a treaty to prevent or slow tobacco consumption around the world. It was the third such meeting on enforcement of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, organized under the World Health Organization.

A Boston-based corporate watchdog group said Friday that the countries had agreed in principle to how the guidelines would be worded and would vote on them Saturday.

Kathy Mulvey, policy director at Corporate Accountability International, said that earlier opposition from China and Japan — which both have a stake in tobacco companies — had dissolved. The section of the treaty in question says, in part, that countries should protect their public health policies from “commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry.”

“They provide a roadmap for countries to resist interference by Big Tobacco,” Mulvey said after the meeting wrapped up on Friday.

Mulvey said the treaty’s Article 5.3 establishes that there is “a fundamental conflict of interest between the tobacco industry’s interest and public health.” Tobacco sellers shouldn’t be considered a stakeholder in terms of public health and shouldn’t be making legislative proposals on public health, Mulvey said.

“I think the expertise of companies like ours is important, and we should have a role to play in regulatory issues,” Philip Morris http://finance.boston.com/boston?Page=QUOTE&Ticker;=MO>? International Inc. spokesman Mike Pfeil said. He suggested the industry could be particularly helpful in areas such as stopping illicit trade, on fiscal policy and product regulation.

In the U.S., Congress may consider a bill next year that gives the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate the tobacco industry. No other government agency has had such sweeping oversight.
Altria Group Inc., which until March owned Philip Morris International, has been a leading supporter of the FDA bill.

The global tobacco prevention treaty is designed to reduce the harm associated with tobacco use. The Bush administration has signed it but did not sent it to Congress for ratification, which is required for full participation. Corporate Accountability International spokeswoman Sara Joseph said President-elect Barack Obama had urged the Bush administration to send it to the Senate for a vote in 2005.

Activists said tobacco prevention efforts abroad were being stymied by interference from state-owned tobacco companies in Japan and China as well as the major public companies that sell cigarettes around the world. Philip Morris International, the largest non-governmental cigarette maker in the world, has a partnership with the state-owned China National Tobacco Corp.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been a prominent supporter of tobacco prevention. And his efforts got a boost in July, when Bill Gates pledged additional financial support. Together they have given $375 million to a global effort to cut smoking, $250 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies and $125 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The money will be used on efforts to raise tobacco taxes, help smokers quit, ban tobacco advertising and protect nonsmokers from exposure to smoke. It will also aid efforts to track tobacco use and better understand tobacco control strategies.

At the time of the announcement, Gates said Africa was an area of particular interest.

“The epidemic in Africa is not well advanced, and that means that we can catch it at an early stage,” he said at an event in New York.