Dismantling the arguments
But whereas it’s easy to see why some businesses dealing in tobacco and health would appreciate what they would see as the benefits of such a system, I struggle to understand why the WHO would find it advantageous. So let me take a guess about what we might be told if the WHO were, with the help of a nosegay, able to bring itself to answer questions from a representative of the tobacco industry. Firstly, though, it is necessary to understand that the WHO believes that the implementation of its track-and-trace system will reduce—it actually uses the word “eliminate,” but that is the stuff of dreams—the sale of illicit cigarettes and therefore smoking. Given this, I imagine it would say the consumption of tobacco causes the deaths of 8 million people a year whereas Covid-19 has so far (see below) caused the deaths of 430,241, so tobacco is by far the bigger threat.
There are a number of problems with this argument. The main one as I see things is that whereas tobacco has been around for a long time and therefore has to be subjected to control measures, there is still time to build robust preventative measures to combat the thousands of potential viruses that are lining up to devastate lives and economies around the world. And in the eyes of all but the most virulent free market supporters, prevention must be preferred to control, so a people contact tracing system should be regarded as being way more urgent than a cigarette pack track-and-trace system.
Another problem with the above argument is that it is based on two figures that are clearly wrong: one being ludicrously rounded, the other being ludicrously precise, even though they are both WHO figures published this year. The 8 million figure was published on May 26 without even the qualification of an “about” while the 430,241 figure was published in respect of the period of the Covid-19 crisis up to June 15.
Does it matter that these figures are wrong? To my mind, yes. It’s a matter of trust. We seem to have reached a situation whereby any information dumped on the unsuspecting public, no matter how distorted, can be justified on the grounds that it is meant to bring about the most advantageous result, seemingly defined as the result best suited to the ideologies of those putting that information out. And once people and organizations start to believe in this way of carrying on, especially as in the case of the WHO, if they refuse to engage with those of the outer dark, they become reckless. For instance, in recent times, the WHO’s annual tobacco-related deaths figure seems to have been playing 1 million unit leapfrog with its pollution-related deaths figure.
But it is not only the hyperinflation of these figures that make them look suspect. Given that many people who die of tobacco-related or pollution-related deaths will die from, say, lung disease, how is it possible to accurately ascribe these deaths to their rightful causes? If a smoker living in a flat adjacent to a city’s main diesel bus parking and servicing depot dies, is her death put down to pollution or to smoking? No prizes for correctly guessing the answer.
The end result of all this will surely be that no thinking person will trust such figures and, by extension, the individuals and organizations that pump them out with the further consequence that various people will be wringing their hands because the person in the street has become fed up with experts. It is necessary to remember that if you publish dodgy information, as it is passed down the line it will become further distorted until the point where it becomes drivel.
Take the 430,241 figure. In a story in my newspaper, the writer or editor, presumably concerned that it was not possible to justify such an exact figure, rendered it as “more than 430,000,” which sidesteps one problem but runs into another. What does “more than” mean here: 430,001, 4.3 million, 4.3 billion?
Meanwhile, a recent note by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), which claimed that “contrary to headlines suggesting that nicotine protects against Covid-19, smokers are more likely [presumably than nonsmokers] to contract the coronavirus.” It makes this claim, even though it quotes a WHO note that says, in part, “There are currently no peer-reviewed studies that have evaluated the risk of SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes Covid-19] infection among smokers.”
But not content with this nonsense, the BHF goes on to say, “Even if smoking did have a small protective effect against Covid-19, this would still be hugely outweighed by the well-known harm that smoking causes.” How can this be justified either at a personal or a smoker-population level, especially when no timeframe is mentioned? To make any such claim, you would firstly have to know what is the level of this so-called “small” protective effect, and this is not known. Then, on an individual level, you would need to know a good deal about the smoker’s personal details, including such things as her age and general state of health. And, as time goes by and we learn more about this novel virus and the disease itself, we would probably need to know more. After all, from my reading of some of the latest findings, the unprecedented damage done to the lungs and other organs while Covid-19 is active in the body far outweighs the damage done by smoking over a similar period.
The point is, we don’t know enough about Covid-19 to be handing out anything but the most basic advice about such things as hand washing and social distancing. And if we don’t know, we should say we don’t know. We should not be extolling the efficacy, nor the dangers, of nicotine in the fight against the virus unless we are fairly certain that we are right.
