Knock, knock. WHO’s there?
Remember Andrew Black? He’s the former civil servant who was tobacco programme manager at the Department of Health when Forest was campaigning against plain packaging.
In 2016, after a decade leading the UK’s tobacco control programme, Black moved to Geneva to work for the World Health Organisation (WHO) and now, ten years later, he has been appointed Head of the Secretariat of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. In other words, a very big cheese in tobacco control. Makes me proud to be British!
Or does it? It’s worth recalling that in 2012, a few weeks after Forest submitted the names of almost 250,000 signatories to a petition opposing plain packs, we found ourselves embroiled in a rather messy dispute concerning the authenticity of some of those signatures and on September 17, 2012, I wrote:
On Friday the Department of Health released correspondence between the DH and Forest (among others). It was published online in response to a Freedom of Information request from an anonymous third party.
The correspondence includes two letters to Forest from the tobacco programme manager at the DH. In his letters he highlighted five specific incidents concerning the Hands Off Our Packs (HOOPs) campaign.
He also requested detailed information about the collection of signatures. Sample questions: Did you engage any agencies or contractors to collect signatures? How many individuals have been engaged to collect signatures? Where have those collecting signatures been located?
In one letter he records (with a straight face, apparently) a complaint by leading anti-tobacco campaigner Professor John Britton, director of the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, chair of the Royal College of Physicians tobacco advisory group, and a member of the ASH Board of Trustees.
In the other he describes an incident he himself witnessed at Waterloo station in London. Seizing on this, the Observer yesterday published a short report that you can read in one of two ways.
On one hand it is laughably biased with no attempt at balance. On the other, and to the certain chagrin of tobacco control campaigners (including, I suspect, the DH), it only merited an entry in the 'News In Brief' section on page 16.
As far as I know the report is not even online, which shows how highly the Observer rated the story. Unfortunately one casualty of this indifference is Forest because on Friday the Observer invited me to respond to the DH's allegations but the published report is so brief that my response was omitted. For the record this is part of what I wrote:
The DH outlined five very specific incidents that we were disturbed to hear about and have treated seriously. These have been received in the context of almost a quarter of a million signatures, submitted by Forest, opposing plain packaging. The scale of the public response against standardised packaging of tobacco products has therefore been nothing short of overwhelming, and the DH should not lose sight of that.
Anyway, someone, somewhere, decided to dig a little deeper [into the HOOPs campaign] and on August 24 [2012] I received a third letter from the tobacco programme manager at the DH:
I am writing to you in connection with a request for information received by the Department of Health (DH) that is being considered under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI Act).
I am informing you that the request we have received relates (among other things) to correspondence between DH and Forest during the period 16 April to 10 August 2012 (inclusive), including any correspondence “in connection with the Hands Off Our Packs campaign”.
Well, Forest has nothing to hide so I was happy to write back:
Thank you for your letter of 24 August concerning a request for information received by the Department of Health under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. I have no objection to the DH disclosing the correspondence specified in your letter.
In fact, I went further and suggested that, ‘for completeness ... I would suggest that you also disclose ... my email to you dated 16 July 2012’.
This email did little more than acknowledge his earlier letters but it included the important point that ‘We take complaints such as this very seriously’, plus the assurance that ‘I will respond to your letters in due course’. Which indeed I did.
The DH is now in possession of two further letters from me, one dated August 30 [2012], the second dated September 7. The first is a five-page letter which provides a detailed response to all queries. The second is a four-page letter in which I highlight several concerns that we have about the Plain Packs Protect campaign.
Neither letter was part of the package of correspondence released on Friday because they were sent outside the period stipulated in the FOI request. Suffice to say there is lot more to be said on this subject. Watch this space.
I then added a short postscript:
The Observer refers to me by name but doesn't identify the tobacco programme manager by name, even when he is the person the report is referring to. Instead he is a ‘DoH official’ or, bizarrely, he is referred to in the plural (‘Department of Health officials’).
I have always found it curious that key civil servants – some of whom are far more influential than the ministers they work for – are given a cloak of anonymity by the media.
This, I suggested, has to change.
As it happens, I too chose not to reveal the name of the tobacco programme manager in my post because I don’t like targeting individuals if it’s not strictly necessary. Nevertheless, if you’ve come this far (and recall my opening sentence) you don’t need to be Hercule Poirot to deduce that our inquisitor in 2012 is the newly appointed Head of the Secretariat of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Fancy that!
Full story: Forest, the Department of Health, and a Freedom of Information request (September 2012)
As an aside, it will be interesting to see whether Black’s promotion leads to any change in the WHO’s largely negative attitude to e-cigarettes and other reduced risk products. After all, it was in 2015, when he was still tobacco programme manager at the Department of Health, that it was announced on the UK government website that:
An expert independent evidence review published today by Public Health England (PHE) concludes that e-cigarettes are significantly less harmful to health than tobacco and have the potential to help smokers quit smoking.
Key findings included the claim the current best estimate is that e-cigarettes are around 95% less harmful than smoking.
Although it’s eleven years old, that estimate is still used today to support vaping as a significantly reduced risk alternative to smoking, but the WHO has never embraced vaping in the same way as the DH and other tobacco control bodies in the England. Now that he is in charge of the WHO’s tobacco control programme, can we expect a more liberal approach to reduced risk nicotine products? Watch this space.
