“If the aim is to help people stop smoking, we should be encouraging more vaping – not less”

The World Health Organisation’s ‘Tobacco Free Initiative’ aims to speed up the gradual transition to a smoke-free world.

And yet, for some reason, it is also opposed to vaping, the safe alternative to smoking which is the best tool we have for helping people quit cigarettes.

It is clear, then, that the WHO doesn’t actually care about making us healthier. In reality, it just wants to accumulate more political control and centralise power over health policy.

Worryingly, our politicians are now starting to listen to the WHO’s harmful anti-vaping rhetoric. New health secretary Sajid Javid is reportedly weighing up introducing new restrictions on vaping to help reach the government’s target of making the country smoke-free by 2030.

That doesn’t make any sense. Vaping is smoke-free. If the aim is to help people stop smoking, we should be encouraging more vaping – not less.

Evidence from Public Health England and Cancer Research makes clear vaping’s benefits, but the WHO – and now, it seems, our government too – is blinkered in its approach to e-cigarettes and hell-bent on ignoring all evidence which opposes its agenda.