The EU’s Bloomberg Report Part 1
The corruption behind the group providing policy guidance against tobacco harm reduction
Co-authored with Peter Beckett
Brussels has today received a report evaluating whether the EU needs to update its rules on tobacco and nicotine. Far from a dispassionate review of the evidence, what we have is a document essentially written by anti-harm reduction activists that will be used as a permission structure by the European Commission to do what it wants to do anyway: ban as many safer nicotine products as it can get away with. The Health Commissioner himself is already gaslighting stakeholders. He must know that when he says that new nicotine products are just as bad as smoking, he is lying.
The European Commission often outsources the policy research process to third parties, as it has done here. Since the days of former Commissioner Edith Cresson paying her dentist hundreds of thousands of euros to do not very much - a scandal that led to the resignation of the Santer Commission in 1999 - the guidance defining the process for awarding EU research contracts have become far more rigorous. Some funding programmes have been criticised by scientists as being too cumbersome.
So it’s worth revisiting how this report came to be, and who’s behind it.
The EU Tender Process
Corruption and bias have been built into the process from the start. In August 2022, the European Commission’s DG Santé (the equivalent of the EU’s Health Ministry) launched a tender process for an external consultant to support the implementation and development of policy and legislation, review the existing tobacco control laws and lay the groundwork for new laws.
The tender was for three million euros, so there should have been widespread interest in the opportunity to advise on the development of tobacco and nicotine policy - to actually create the playbook from which the revision of the 2014 EU Tobacco Products Directive will start. It should have had an army of health and consumer organisations lining up for the opportunity to lobby the European Commission from within.
But oddly, there was only one proposal, via a consortium organised by Open Evidence, and rather than reopening the process to ensure competition and a fair decision process, as is the standard procedure in the EU, the Commission chose to award the funds to this consortium.
Open Evidence is a small Spanish consulting firm without much experience in the field of nicotine products and tobacco harm reduction. Like many organizations in the Brussels Bubble consulting ecosystem, it’s staffed mainly by young graduates after their EU internship experience, waiting for their shot at joining the Commission proper. They survive from one EU funded project to the next.
Not surprisingly, this small and badly equipped company was likely to have to subcontract large chunks of this work. So the membership of their consortium matters.
The Bloomberg Report takes shape
Enter Michael Bloomberg. His foundations have spent $1.6 billion creating a complex web of NGOs, academics and policy groups to promote his misguided campaign against tobacco harm reduction. So when the Commission tender popped up, it was no surprise that anti-nicotine NGOs and researchers funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies would have their hands in this particular cookie jar.
One of the main partners in the consortium is an umbrella group, the European Network for Smoking Prevention (ENSP): an activist NGO running a campaign to make Europe not just tobacco-free, but also nicotine-free by 2030. So what sort of advice would this anti-vaping group offer when consulted on the European Commission’s programme for a smoke-free Europe by 2040?
ENSP received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies via their interconnection with the Smoke Free Partnership (SFP). Bloomberg Philanthropies provided SFP with a grant to build capacity in tobacco taxation in Europe.
ENSP also cooperates with Duncan Thomas from the University of Bath and lead of the Tobacco Control Research Group, a research unit and anti-tobacco/nicotine industry communications campaign nerve centre funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Another group in the EU consortium to provide guidance for European nicotine product policies is Vital Strategies. This is an anti-vaping advocacy group created and funded entirely by Michael Bloomberg. This US-based NGO cannot accept a world where vaping continues to be permitted, so it is hard to comprehend how three million euros of EU taxpayer money has been spent funding this group to advise the European Commission on its nicotine product policies.
The Best Policy Guidance a Billionaire Philanthropist Can Buy
The rabbit hole runs even deeper. Aside from selecting - unopposed - a consortium essentially underpinned by Bloomberg’s support, the very architecture of DG Santé’s policy owes its existence to money from the very same trough.
DG Santé prides itself on its close cooperation with the WHO’s tobacco control arm, the Secretariat of the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control. And here it gets complicated. With $1.6 billion in financing, Bloomberg has basically funded the entire WHO strategy against tobacco and nicotine products via his MPOWER programme. This one billionaire philanthropist has a global influence on public health decisions which, in turn, exerts further pressure on the European Commission to fall in line.
Bloomberg has become notorious for his pig-headed rejection of safer nicotine products to help consumers quit smoking harmful tobacco products. He has used his deep pockets to impose his dogma on the global campaigns against smoking. We have no idea what his motivation is. All we do know is that his conclusions contradict the established science.
Should the Commission allow itself to be beholden to the interests of this American activist philanthropist? Would they let Elon Musk control a review of the EU Digital Services Act if he bought off every NGO involved in the process?
There is a good reason why the EU is considering laws against foreign interest groups or individuals exerting an undue influence on the European policy process. Why should Bloomberg’s anti-nicotine representatives be allowed to influence the European Commission’s guidance for their tobacco and nicotine control policies?
So What?
Did the Commission ignore the proper tender procedure and proposed rules against foreign interests influencing EU policy because of external pressures? Or did the European Commission health directorate just not care?
They clearly feel enabled to set aside proper tender procedures and award a large contract to organisations they like, ignoring their conflicts of interest, because any action they would take would be against Big Tobacco. Who would possibly care, speak out or stand up and defend the tobacco industry?
The media, terrified of being accused of supporting tobacco companies, has largely chosen to not do their job. Politico - the most popular specialist media outlet covering the EU’s political bubble - is working hand in glove with a Bloomberg funded “investigative” media outlet, the Examination, to produce what is essentially anti-nicotine propaganda. And the NGO activists don’t even have to do their job, but just dust off their old anti-smoking campaigns and change the word to “nicotine”.
The tobacco industry broke rules, lied about risk and went around the system 40 years ago. The European Commission is now doing exactly the same. They may feel they are doing it out of some sense of moral righteousness, but that does not hide the stench of their corruption. They will receive the Bloomberg Report against tobacco harm reduction products, ignore the conflicts of interest, and translate the recommendations into regulations. Who would possibly object?
Peter Beckett is the editor of Clearing the Air. This article was published in coordination with Clearing the Air.
Part 2 of this assessment will look at the conflicts of interest and how the consortium and the European Commission chose to deal with them.