The WHO Is Attempting to Sabotage Life-Saving Products

The World Health Organization (WHO) claims to be the ultimate guardian of global health. They view themselves as evidence-driven, impartial, and singularly focused on saving lives. Yet amongst recommendations in the WHO’s recently published European Code Against Cancer, 5th edition (ECAC5), is a line that exposes an ideological refusal to consider scientific consensus. The organization is actively promoting policies that are likely to increase disease and death rather than reduce them.

One of ECAC5’s 14 recommendations states: “All tobacco products should be taxed in a comparable way as appropriate, in particular where the risk of substitution exists.” This language is not accidental. The “risk of substitution” is later clarified when the WHO urges governments to “extend such regulations to apply to all tobacco products, electronic cigarettes, and all novel tobacco and nicotine-containing products.” In plain terms, the WHO is warning policymakers about people switching away from cigarettes to far safer alternatives like e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches and urging them to stamp it out.

That should stop anyone who cares about public health in their tracks.

The Science on Smoking and Harm Reduction Is Settled

Combustible tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death worldwide. Smoking causes lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, and a long list of other fatal conditions. The science on this is settled. It is equally settled that non-combustible nicotine products are dramatically less harmful than smoking. Health authorities in enlightened countries such as UK and New Zealand have concluded that vaping exposes users to only a small fraction of the toxicants found in cigarette smoke. Nicotine pouches and other oral products avoid combustion entirely, eliminating the primary driver of smoking-related disease.

Against this backdrop, the WHO’s framing of “substitution” as a risk is extraordinary. For a smoker who cannot or will not quit nicotine, switching from cigarettes to a non-combustible product is one of the most effective ways to reduce the risk of serious illness and premature death. That is not a public health problem to be prevented, it is the very point of public health.

Taxing Safer Alternatives Guarantees Worse Outcomes

Yet, the WHO proposes taxing these radically different products “in a comparable way,” explicitly prioritizing cases where smokers might switch. This is, by definition, a harm-maximization strategy. High taxes and heavy regulation of safer products make them less accessible and less appealing, pushing people back toward, or keeping them trapped in, their current smoking behavior. The predictable result is more cigarettes smoked, more disease, and more death.

Supporters of these policies often claim they are protecting youth or preventing industry influence. But those justifications collapse under scrutiny. There is no ethical or scientific basis for making safer alternatives harder to access than the most dangerous product in the category. Any genuine commitment to health would demand the opposite, proportionate regulation based on risk, encouraging smokers down the continuum toward lower harm.

Institutional Power Versus Public Health

One can only assume that the WHO persists with this perverse approach due to institutional ideology and self-interest. The organization has built decades of authority around abstinence-only tobacco control. Harm reduction challenges that orthodoxy. It empowers consumers rather than experts, and it reduces dependence on centrally managed cessation programs. In that sense, safer nicotine products threaten institutionalized power and pride, not public health.

The irony is rich in this approach. The WHO has condemned the tobacco industry for decades for denying or obscuring the harms of smoking. Yet, by ignoring or downplaying the relative risk differences between products, and by shamefully advocating policies that actively deter switching, it is now engaging in the same tactics of distorting science and sowing doubt and uncertainty. The difference is that the WHO depends on the public’s trust to spread its misinformation.

That trust is already fragile. The organization’s handling of COVID-19 raised serious questions about transparency, independence, and competence. Its stance on nicotine harm reduction further erodes confidence that it is guided by evidence rather than dogma. When people discover that a “health” authority is working to make lifesaving alternatives less accessible, cynicism will be the rational response.

Policies that foreseeably perpetuate smoking will cost lives. Those lives will belong disproportionately to the poorest and most marginalised smokers, precisely the people public health professionals are supposed to protect.

A health agency worthy of the name would embrace harm reduction, not sabotage it. Until the WHO reverses course, its actions speak louder than its mission statements. They say, clearly, that preserving ideological purity and institutional power matters more than reducing disease. And that is a betrayal no amount of lofty rhetoric can conceal.

Martin Cullip is International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.