Christopher Snowdon // June 24 2024

The WHO published a new report this month, written mostly by British public health experts. It is quite revealing. For example, it included a paragraph as follows:

‘This requires, at a minimum, that governments recognize that the primary interest of all major corporations is profit and, hence, regardless of the product they sell, their interests do not align with either public health or the broader public interest. Any policy that could impact their sales and profits is therefore a threat, and they should play no role in the development of that policy. Similarly, governments must also recognize the now overwhelming evidence (see also chapters 4, 6 and 7) that HHIs [‘health-harming industries’] engage in the same political and scientific practices as tobacco companies and that voluntary or multistakeholder partnership approaches do not work where conflicts of interest exist. Instead, they must regulate other HHIs [‘health-harming industries’], their products and practices, as they do tobacco.’

That’s just one paragraph, but there’s a lot in it. Firstly, they are clearly not just opposed to ‘health-harming industries’ but to private industry and the free market in general. Secondly, they want to exclude all industries from the policy-making process, as already happens with the tobacco industry. Thirdly, they want to regulate all ‘health-harming industries’ in the same way as they regulate tobacco. These industries include alcohol, food and fossil fuels, but the report also mentions pharmaceuticals, infant formula, gambling, firearms, healthcare (!) and sugary drinks.

As the quote above makes clear, they think that all private industry damages health in some way. This is all there in black and white, and there is much more in the report. This is not scaremongering or the slippery slope fallacy. It is in an official WHO document and further confirmation that the modern “public health” movement is an arm of the hard left presented as an arm of medicine. It would be tempting to tell the authors to stay in their lane, but anti-capitalist nanny statism is their lane.

For over a decade, such academics, mostly from Britain and Australia, have been pumping out studies about the “commercial determinants of health” and the “corporate political activity” of “unhealthy commodity industries”. The new WHO report is a sort of greatest hits collection. Last year they published a whole series of articles in the Lancet in which they claimed that there is “growing evidence that neoliberalism has been damaging to health” and called for “a normative shift away from harmful consumptogenic systems”.

Half-baked Marxist rhetoric has been rife in the social sciences for decades, but these people have a vaguely coherent point to make and are pursuing a serious, if terrifying, agenda. Since they do not believe in human agency, they assume that people only make “unhealthy choices”, such as eating processed ham, because the system that controls them has been rigged by big corporations. They say in today’s report that “consumers do not have capacity (time or resources) to make the ‘right’ choice”. Fortunately, public health academics know what the right choice is and could impose it on a grateful population if it were not for the pesky free market. Hence their rage against capitalism, which extends to suspicion of intellectual property, international trade, share buybacks, impact assessments (because they allow businesses to engage with policy-makers) and even the EU single market.

One of their favourite tropes - mentioned in the paragraph I’ve quoted from their WHO report above - is that ‘health-harming industries’ “engage in the same political and scientific practices as tobacco companies”. They have produced dozens of articles making this claim, but it rests on businesses engaging in mundane political ‘strategies’ such as lobbying politicians, building coalitions, commissioning research and occasionally threatening legal action. Not only are these ‘tactics’ used by all sorts of industries, they are also used by civil society organisations when they engage in political activity, including public health campaigners. There is very little in the ‘tobacco playbook’ that public health campaigners do not do. The only difference is that they use different names for it. Lobbying, for example, is described as ‘advocacy’ when public health actors do it but as ‘interference’ when industry does it.

There is a huge amount of projection here. The relevant phenomenon is not that the infant formula industry uses many of the same ‘tactics’ as the tobacco industry, but that the public health racket is trying to do exactly the same thing to a multitude of industries as it did to tobacco (despite denying for decades that there is a slippery slope).

What is this, for example, but sheer projection?

‘We propose that UCI [unhealthy commodity industry] framing is nested within an overarching and simplistic dichotomy: corporate intentions, values and actions are ‘good’; those of the proponents of industry-opposed policies are questionable or ‘bad.’
… corporations position themselves as representing and speaking for the public interest while they position those proposing the policy as damaging the public interest.’

‘A more subtle but crucial weakness is the caricaturised accounts of social life offered by corporate actors, where everything they represent and do is good and everything opponents represent and do are bad, for example: proposed policy is utterly bad, has no redeeming features and will have catastrophic consequences; only corporations (not the public health community) has the public’s interest at heart and the expertise to address the health problems.’

By focusing on superficial similarities between Big Tobacco and Big Food (or whatever) the intention is to (a) encourage policymakers to regulate them both in the same way, and (b) to deflect attention from the fact that the slippery slope has become a runaway train. Remarkably, they seem to be getting away with it and the Zombie WHO is now officially on board.

A version of this article was originally posted on Christopher Snowdon's Substack. Christopher Snowdon is the Head of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, our British member think tank.