As the eleventh session of the Conference of the Parties (COP11) to the WHO FCTC opened yesterday, many in the tobacco and nicotine industries and tobacco harm reduction communities watched the livestream closely. Only parts of the first and fifth days are scheduled to be available to the public and media—a limitation that has drawn significant criticism.
WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus opened the meeting, saying, “We are so used to hearing ‘tobacco kills us’, it no longer shocks us… If tobacco were a virus, we would call it a pandemic.” According to his X account, he urged Parties to advance implementation, be vigilant about “tobacco industry tactics,” and invited Parties to join the FCTC.
That message drew pushback on X from the World Vapers’ Alliance, which wrote: “First up, @DrTedros, first lie. He claims vapes and pouches are not harm-reduction products but harm production. Science and millions of former smokers strongly disagree. He further says there is no evidence for their net public health benefit. This is wrong. Every smoker who switches to less harmful alternatives gains clear health benefits. It’s not rocket science.”
One prominent critic of COP11 is Clive Bates, director of Counterfactual Consulting Limited, an organization that works to bring information from closed meetings into the public domain. Bates has repeatedly criticized the conference’s openness.
“The FCTC COP has extremely poor openness, transparency, and viewpoint diversity,” he wrote on his website. “Delegates should welcome and demand a broader range of observers at COP meetings and greater transparency to avoid a situation where one billionaire funder can speak through dozens of ‘civil society’ organizations.”
After the COP11 agenda was released, Bates provided a commentary on each section and summarized his view: “In overview, the agenda is weak, with the greatest priority given to matters that fall outside the FCTC, and a contemptuous dismissal of Parties’ request for a balanced and objective discussion of the potential for tobacco harm reduction. The COP should focus on the big issue: How to drive down global smoking?”
On the agenda for November 18 was the Convention Secretariat report titled, “Implementation of measures to prevent and reduce tobacco consumption, nicotine addiction and exposure to tobacco smoke, and the protection of such measures from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry in light of the tobacco industry’s narrative on ‘harm reduction’ (Articles 5.2(b) and 5.3 of the WHO FCTC) – proposed by Parties.”
Bates was sharply critical of that paper. “This is the worst FCTC COP paper I have ever read, and that is quite an achievement,” he wrote, pointing to two core concerns he says should trouble Parties regardless of their stance on tobacco harm reduction: 1) “The contemptuous and dismissive attitude towards one or more Parties seeking a substantive discussion of a serious public health strategy. I have never seen a convention secretariat behave in this way in this or any other convention.” 2) “The quality of the analysis and understanding shown in the paper about the subject under discussion, tobacco harm reduction. This is dismissed as a form of tobacco industry interference. Yet, it has the support of several Parties, high-credibility organizations such as the Royal College of Physicians, and many of the world’s top independent experts.”
This article was adapted from an original report published on tobaccoreporter.com. All rights belong to the original publisher.