When the COP26 climate change conference hits Glasgow at the end of October, the media will be out in force to discover how world leaders are going to meet their ambitious carbon emission targets.
It will be on the front pages. Edited highlights will be on television. Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon will be elbowing each other out of the way to get in the limelight. Extinction Rebellion will be performing their doomsday japes outside.
But when COP9 begins in November, few will notice. Admittedly, this event is being held online this year, but it would have flown under the radar even if it had been held in the Hague, as planned. It always does. Like COP26, it is a United Nations conference, but that is where the similarities end.
You probably haven’t even heard of it. Its full name is the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control’s Ninth Conference of the Parties. The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is the first and only international treaty of the WHO and COP is where it develops consensus statements and forges the path ahead.
For the WHO, the path leads not just to a tobacco-free future, but a nicotine-free future. This is not hyperbole — WHO Europe said it explicitly last year — and it is becoming a big problem for millions of vapers worldwide.
Around 3.6 million people in Britain vape. Most of them used to be cigarette smokers and no longer smoke tobacco at all. Public Health England and the Royal College of Physicians have both stated that the risks of vaping are at least 95 per cent lower than the risks of smoking. The US National Academies of Science Engineering and Mathematics concluded, after a thorough review of the evidence, that ‘e-cigarettes are likely to be far less harmful than combustible tobacco cigarettes’. The influential anti-smoking pressure group Action on Smoking and Health is supportive of vaping and says that ‘e–cigarettes have proved to be an important gateway out of smoking, not into it’.
The WHO, however, has been steadfastly opposed to e-cigarettes since they became popular a decade ago. The FCTC treaty explicitly defines ‘tobacco control’ as ‘a range of supply, demand and harm reduction strategies’ to reduce tobacco consumption, but it has never endorsed harm reduction in practice. At COP7 in India five years ago it called on member states to ‘prohibit or restrict the manufacture, importation, distribution, presentation, sale and use’ of e-cigarettes. Ideally, the WHO wants prohibition, but it will settle for excessive regulation to deter smokers from switching if a total ban is not politically feasible.
Christopher Snowdon – The Spectator – 2021-07-31.
Want More Investigative Content?
