The state is a monster no matter where it is. Thieves. Criminals. Governments.
Is there a connection between ebola and e-cigarettes?I don’t mean to imply that vaping has caused the epidemic in west Africa. But the World Health Organisation (WHO) now has serious questions to answer about its months of complacency over ebola. WHO’s director-general, Margaret Chan, made a speech only two weeks ago implying that tobacco control and the fight against e-cigarettes is a more important issue.
On October 13 Dr Chan gave her apologies for not being able to attend a conference on ebola and made a speech instead at a WHO summit in Moscow on tobacco. This is what she said there: “Some people speculated that I would not attend this meeting because I am so busy with so many other outbreaks of communicable diseases [ebola was third on her list, after flu and Mers coronavirus].No. No. No. I will not cancel my attendance at this meeting because it is too important . . . Tobacco control unquestionably is our biggest, surest and best opportunity to save some millions of lives . . .The next challenge is that the tobacco industry is increasing its dominance over the market for electronic cigarettes.”
The $20 million Moscow meeting happened behind closed doors, with even accredited journalists excluded. High on the agenda was vaping. WHO has long been trying to define e-cigarettes as tobacco products, though they are not, so as to bring them under the aegis of its tobacco “framework convention”.
The outcome of the Moscow meeting was the suggestion that more countries should ban e-cigarettes, despite the lack of scientific evidence that they do harm and ignoring the growing evidence that they save lives. Such bans would be convenient for pharmaceutical companies, with which WHO has close links, whose sales of nicotine gum and patches have been in free fall because of e-cigarettes.
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