Public health often warns about tobacco industry interference—but what happens when tobacco control itself is captured by benevolent donors and non-profit organizations? In this GFN interview, economist Roger Bate explains why the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control is uniquely vulnerable to outside influence, how Bloomberg-funded NGOs shape policy agendas upstream, and why this system consistently excludes tobacco harm reduction despite strong evidence.
Featuring:
DR. ROGER BATE
Economist, Health Policy & Medicines
Nonresident Scholar, Intl. Center for Law & Economics
laweconcenter.org
@RogerBate3
Transcription:
00:10 - 01:06
[Brent Stafford]
Hi, I'm Brent Stafford, and welcome to another edition of RegWatch on GFN.TV. Regulatory capture is a term often heard in policy circles, usually raised by critics of regulatory agencies seen as too close to the companies they're charged with overseeing. It's almost always framed as a complaint about corporate influence, whether oil, pharmaceuticals, or a one-time big tobacco. But today, is regulatory capture a concern when it comes to the regulation of safer nicotine products? And are agencies and organizations such as the World Health Organization and the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control vulnerable not just to influence, but broader system shaping? Joining us today to unpack this issue is Dr. Roger Bate, economist and non-resident scholar at the International Centre for Law and Economics. Dr. Bate, welcome back to the show.
01:06 - 01:07
[Roger Bate]
Great to be with you.
01:08 - 01:29
[Brent Stafford]
Dr. Bate, when we last spoke with you just before COP11, The Conference of the Parties to the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control held in Geneva last November. Coming out of COP11, what impressions did you form about the FCTC and what did you think of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance's Good Cop 2.0?
01:29 - 02:20
[Roger Bate]
Well, I would say that what struck me most about COP11 was how closed and self-referential it's become. Debate was minimal. If anything, dissent was discouraged. Harm reduction perspectives were effectively excluded. It wasn't really a conference functioning as a forum of, if you like, weighing evidence. It was more like an exercise in compliance. So it was a very negative take on that. Whereas I would say that the Good Cop event did exactly what COP11 should have done. It created space for evidence, for plurality of voices. There was disagreement. Consumer voices were heard, which I think is important. It wasn't anti-tobacco control, far from it. It was more pro-accountability. So I think the contrast really tells you a lot about where the real intellectual openness is now, and it is not at the official COP.
02:20 - 02:31
[Brent Stafford]
So before we go any further, can you explain what regulatory capture means in its traditional sense and why it's usually discussed in the context of corporate influence?
02:32 - 03:15
[Roger Bate]
And I think that's, generally speaking, historically been fair. Regulatory capture refers to a situation where regulators really come to be serving the interests of the industries that they regulate rather than the public. It's been associated, as you mentioned in your introduction, with corporate lobbying, revolving doors, financial influence, I suppose, oil, banking, pharmaceuticals, and of course, historically, tobacco. So the assumption is straightforward. Companies seek profit. regulators seek power or resources. The capture happens when those incentives align too closely for the benefit of the players in that process rather than society as a whole.
03:15 - 03:22
[Brent Stafford]
So with that definition in mind, does regulatory capture help explain what we're seeing in the regulation of safer nicotine products?
03:23 - 04:18
[Roger Bate]
Partially. We see some level of corporate Interference is maybe too strong, but certainly influence from the pharmaceutical industry because they control significant parts of the traditional tobacco harm reduction, lozenges, patches, gum, stuff like that. But the manufacturers of lower risk products that are market driven, lower risk products, vaping pouches, snooze and stuff like that are systematically excluded from the process. So if capture exists, it's not operating in the classic definition for most of the industry. It's the policy is kind of running against innovation, consumer choice. sensible regulations so it's not the traditional but there are traditional aspects to it because the pharmaceutical industry is part of the of the capture process if you like
04:19 - 04:43
[Brent Stafford]
Dr. Bates, in one of your recent papers released on your Substack titled, Mapping Philanthropic Capture in Global Tobacco, Bloomberg's Influence over the FCTC and the Suppression of Harm Reduction. In that paper, you argue that what's happening here isn't classic regulatory capture at all, but something you call philanthropic capture. What do you mean by that?
04:44 - 05:31
[Roger Bate]
I guess the most important thing is that big donors are not lobbying regulators directly, but instead they shape the entire knowledge, if you like, the policy ecosystem. So they are supporting and directing and massively influencing what research gets funded, which NGOs are legitimate, which are legitimized within the process to their aims, which experts are heard, and which questions are considered settled. And, you know, in the Hamiltonian sense, who's in the room where it happens? So in tobacco control, this is producing, to use an agricultural term, a monoculture, not because of corruption, but because funding, careers and access all flow in one ideological direction.
05:32 - 05:51
[Brent Stafford]
Now on this program, we've been covering Michael Bloomberg's role in global tobacco control for more than a decade and his influence over the WHO and FCTC is something our audience is already well familiar with. Do we have an idea of how much money and resources Bloomberg provides to the WHO?
05:52 - 07:03
[Roger Bate]
The amount of money directly to the WHO is not that large. It runs in the millions, but it's not vast. But then the Framework Conventional Tobacco Control Secretariat budget isn't that large. But the amount of money that Bloomberg has put into the entire ecosystem, as I called it, is well over a billion dollars over the last decade. And that makes him the largest single financier of global tobacco control infrastructure. And with that comes an enormous amount of influence in terms of the alignment of NGOs would hit the mission that he wants, the academic careers and academic centers follow what he wants, surveillance system, policy advocacy, you name it, it's there being driven by the approach he takes. Now, if I was spending a billion dollars, if I ever got a billion dollars, I would probably want it to be I'd wanted to be influencing the things that I thought mattered. The fact that you could argue the fact that other people haven't put money up in opposition to that is the part of the problem. But, you know, we can get onto that in a second. It's just that he's thrown the financial heft that he has to such an extent that he is dominating how tobacco control is now viewed.
07:04 - 07:15
[Brent Stafford]
So when people talk about Bloomberg's influence, they often imagine his donations having direct influence, direct pressure or top-down control. Is this a fair representation?
07:16 - 09:36
[Roger Bate]
I think it is. It's not precise. It's perhaps where critics misunderstand some of it. It's like, there's no evidence that, I have no evidence that Michael Bloomberg is phoning Geneva, phoning Tedros and others to give them instructions. That's not how it works. The influence is systemic. It's not giving direction. It's creating the ecosystem so that there's almost no possibility of a counter voice. And it's almost as though the influence is upstream. He's determining the studies that get done, the NGOs, who attends the COPs. That's the other thing we can get onto that. Who is allowed to brief delegates and which experts are treated as authoritative. So it makes it difficult if you are coming in from a particularly if you're a smaller emerging market, but I'd say even a larger developed country. It's like if you're being bombarded by experts from this university and that university and this NGO and they're all speaking with one voice, you kind of start questioning your own evidence as to whether you might be You might be correct It's like all ships must sail in the same direction not only that but all ships must have square sails of this size and That they must only have conformed to these dimensions and that if yours don't then you're not then you're not part of the flotilla So it's it's it can be very prescriptive without actually having those as written rules. It's just like you know that to bring it away from ships, but into the real world. It's like, if you don't write the right, the correct conclusions, your paper is not going to be published in these journals. And journal publication is critical to academic careers. And journal publications is often the key thing that the mainstream media will rely on. And historically, credit to the mainstream media, they will go out and dig out. It's like you expect the peer review process to work. And as I've written in other places at other times, I've written about how the peer review process for tobacco harm reduction is probably broken. There are numerous papers that have been retracted for poor science in some instances lying by the authors. But if your conclusions are in one direction, you're far more likely to be published. So that's the process. It's not that you need to get on a phone call on a phone to direct policy in Geneva. It's everyone is sailing in your direction.
09:36 - 09:44
[Brent Stafford]
So why is it then that the FCTC is uniquely vulnerable to donor influence compared to other WHO bodies?
09:45 - 10:39
[Roger Bate]
Well, it's almost as though, unlike vaccine pre-qualification or disease surveillance, Tobacco control often comes down to values, behavior, regulation, where evidence is easily politicized. Combine that with the exclusion rules that ban industry partition, but not donor-funded advocacy, and you create a system that's structurally vulnerable to capture from one direction only. So intrinsically, they don't have that much money. There's a lot of money that is floating around the WHO, but the Secretariat does not have a lot of it. So Bloomberg and the groups that he supports are pushing a lot of that. It's not evidence-based often. It becomes, as I say, about values, behavior, and regulatory structure. So evidence becomes far more secondary, or at least heavily politicized.
10:40 - 10:47
[Brent Stafford]
You mentioned in your paper, Dr. Bate, evidence production and expert consensus. Talk about that a little bit.
10:47 - 11:44
[Roger Bate]
within the the the process of get of of generating the information that is used you know you no longer have the vo you can't really trust the voices that you would want to trust in opposition to that so civil society the fctc is is not really it's grassroots it's it's a kind of professional advocacy class that mixes a mixture of academia, credentialed salary, international experts. And so it becomes very self-serving. They speak the language of independence, but really they function as kind of a coordinated policy machine. So it's very hard to tease these things out. It's often not that the individual academics involved are bad people. It's that, as I say, it's driving in one direction. And if you control the funding, you kind of control the questions as to which questions are gonna be addressed.
11:45 - 12:04
[Brent Stafford]
So, Dr. Bate, as you just described, civil society at the FCTC is not a collection of independent voices, but as a highly professionalized ecosystem. And just to be clear, that influence that kind of comes from them is primarily exercised through Bloomberg-funded NGOs, correct?
12:05 - 13:46
[Roger Bate]
Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing situation where, and I may get the numbers not precise here, I think these are right, but something of the order of the 27 NGOs of any size that are allowed in the room within the system. I think 15 are either founded or heavily funded by Michael Bloomberg, which means that I think that's about 57%. That's an astonishing level of influence for one donor through his variety of philanthropies and subsets of that. So, you know, it becomes group speak. It's Orwellian in its own, it's like, unless you use the correct words, you are on the outside. You're not part of the current thinking if you don't use the right language. So it's, you know, you would want the WHO and the meetings to not just be a convening space for the same ideas. But that's what it's become. It's like we had far more discussion at the Good Cop event from Taxpayers Protection Alliance than was inside the room, as far as I know, because I'm not allowed inside the room. and although certain things are televised most things aren't so for a government-funded entity government-funded entity which isn't discussing issues of national security it is astonishing to me that not all of it is not held in public i mean you can have backroom discussions fine i'm not expected to be able to see what's happening in the room where five or six nations decide that they you know they want to have a discussion privately that's fine but anything that's in a public plenary
13:46 - 14:16
[Brent Stafford]
we should be able to see we as in taxpayers of the world because our governments fund this and it's uh that's not what's happening so one of the things that happened at cop 11 that was a pretty big deal for tobacco harm reduction advocates was what new zealand said uh in their opening uh message to cop here let's have a listen new zealand has made great strides in implementing the framework convention on tobacco control and reducing smoking rates
14:16 - 16:13
[Video]
Since 2012, the adult daily smoking rate in New Zealand has more than halved and is now 6.9%, among the lowest in the world. We are close to our goal of adult daily smoking prevalence of less than 5%. The theme of uniting for tobacco-free generation resonates strongly. We are committed to this goal and we have seen great success. Among people 14 to 24, only 3% smoke daily. And of 15 to 17 year olds, just 0.6% smoke daily. A new generation is growing up smoke-free. 2019 smoking rates have declined more rapidly in association with implementation of tobacco harm reduction measures, particularly regulated access to vaping products. We apply risk proportionate regulations to vaping products to ensure that they are available to support people in quitting smoking while discouraging youth uptake. New Zealand continues to tightly regulate tighten regulatory controls to protect youth, including retail, product and marketing rules to strengthen reinforcement. These measures are working. 2025 data shows that vaping rates continue to fall. New Zealand remains firm committed to reducing the immense harm caused by tobacco control, neutralising all three aspects of tobacco control as defined in Article 1D of the Convention, supply, demand and harm reduction strategies. We look forward to sharing our experiences and learning from others as we work together towards a world where smoking no longer claims millions of lives.
16:15 - 16:19
[Brent Stafford]
So what did you think of what New Zealand said and how COP reacted?
16:20 - 17:54
[Roger Bate]
Well, what's amazing about New Zealand is that it is one of the lowest, if not the lowest, smoking rates in the world. And it is done that by the traditional means that the FCTC and anti-smoking advocates have been saying for years – advertising restrictions are out by ban, sports sponsorship bans, high levels of taxation on cigarettes, all of those, but then it's also embraced the tobacco harm reduction, which has meant that people can switch for the social rituals of smoking that they like to vaping or maybe pouches or other things. And so, you know, it's worked. They've massively lower level of smoking, still nicotine used in the country, but it's effectively closing in like Sweden on below 5% smoking rates. It's not quite there, I don't think yet, but it's getting there towards where that would be traditionally considered as smoking has been stopped in the country, but at a population level. um and you know this should have been they should have been getting rounds of applause for well done you're heading in the right direction this is a huge success we can all learn from that but instead they get dirty astro awards and they get um they get condemnatory language from uh from the secretariat and it's it's it's quite startling that some a nation that is achieving the aims of the protocol the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, rather. They're achieving the aims of that, and then they are being criticized. It makes you realize that the process and the people behind the process are more important to their secretariat than the results. And that's very worrying.
17:55 - 18:30
[Brent Stafford]
tobacco control rails against so-called tobacco industry influence. They make a big deal about the tobacco industry interference index. And oh my goodness, and so forth. And then, of course, anybody that is on the THR side, you know, you're persona non grata because you're just expected to be a shill for industry. So clearly, they see... conflict if there's profit motive behind it. But if there's no profit motive, they don't see the conflict. And isn't that what we're seeing with Bloomberg?
18:31 - 20:35
[Roger Bate]
I think that what you're looking at is moving from you know a slightly weak interpretation of the rules of conflict of interest to willfully only seeing conflicts of interest where it goes against the agenda that they preset so as far as i'm concerned the way that the who the fctc interprets conflicts of interest is entirely broken in the way that i said that i think peer review for tobacco harm reduction is is broken so it's almost worth not talking about it they they will only discuss conflict of interest where it goes against their agenda So, you know, normally I'd like to actually go into the detail of this and that, but it's effectively if you say time reduction is bad, the assumption is that you are funded by the tobacco industry. Sorry, if you say tobacco harm reduction is good, you're funded by the tobacco industry, which doesn't make sense because still today, you know, the tobacco industry sells a lot of cigarettes, makes a lot of money from cigarettes. They're moving into these other products as well because they see the writing on the world. They see the direction that the world is heading. And, you know, they've changed as well. You know, I first was interested to followed kind of the health aspects of tobacco 30 odd years ago. And the CEOs of these companies and the languages that they the language that they've used, they've released that this century they've said, yes, we acknowledge tobacco is dangerous when smoked. It's like we're trying to come up with alternative products, which we don't think nicotine is as dangerous or anywhere near as dangerous. And that's our market. So the company's changed in the way that, you know, you would vote in a new party, a new president every four years in the United States or in other countries, different type of units. You expect them to be different. Well, I think the CEOs of tobacco companies have changed enormously since the 1980s and 90s. Yet the way that they're portrayed is as though this is still the 1980s and they're denying that nicotine's addictive and smoking's harmful. The world moved on. And I think that a lot of the tobacco harm reduction people, sorry, a lot of the tobacco control people are stuck in a 1980s mindset.
20:35 - 20:43
[Brent Stafford]
That's true. I can agree with you on that for certain. And, you know, they don't have redemption in their heart.
20:43 - 21:37
[Roger Bate]
right i i i i'm not going to speak to motivations i i don't know a lot of these people well enough i wish i'd been able to be in the room so that i could actually talk to people because it's like i generally believe that you know people follow most people are not real shills in the sense that they'll say anything for money most people believe in what they're arguing now sometimes they'll be you know there's there's there's blinders on and willfully ignoring certain levels of evidence, but they're not out and out charlatans. I don't know. I don't know what the motivation is because, and I can't believe it's all just money. At least enough of them must believe their own propaganda that, you know, that pouch manufacturers and vaping manufacturers are all just in the pocket of the tobacco industry for some reason. I can't believe that they're all as malign as perhaps it's easy to portray them as.
21:37 - 21:51
[Brent Stafford]
So are we carrying water for Bloomberg here in this episode? Because I always thought he was a bad actor when it comes to this issue, his prohibition mindset, using his millions to drive policy, or have I got it wrong?
21:52 - 23:03
[Roger Bate]
No, I don't think we're excusing him. It's like, I think we're being precise. Bloomberg is not a cartoon villain. He is a sophisticated actor who believes deeply in prohibitionist public health. But as I said, I'm not sure of a lot of the actors, but I've listened to enough of Michael Bloomberg speaking about this and other subjects over the last 15, 20 years that I think we could safely say that he is deeply prohibitionist when it comes to public health. But good intentions, as I assume they are from him, don't justify epistemic dominance, which he has, or policy monocultures, which, especially when the monoculture is... It's kind of like growing corn or alfalfa in places where water is in short supply. It's just not a good idea. It's that kind of monoculture. It's the wrong crop. Let's put it that way. So he's not a cartoon villain. He is a sophisticated actor, I'll say it again. But I think he's almost completely wrong when it comes to modern nicotine policy.
23:04 - 23:09
[Brent Stafford]
So then how does this all play out then for say low and middle income countries?
23:10 - 25:10
[Roger Bate]
Well, you know, ironically, sadly, the lower middle income countries are the ones that are hit the hardest. They rely, their health people rely on WHO guidance. Often donor funded technical assistance are incredibly important in some countries that I've been to. Less so about tobacco, more to do with things like malaria and HIV decades ago when I was working on that. So I know how, you know, there just isn't the level of capacity. So they rely on that technical assistance, which is often provided by these NGOs. And when those sources reject harm reduction, you get countries which then will find ways to justify prohibition on these things. And it's quite easy to do, especially in countries that grow tobacco, because then you have an entire agricultural lobby that backs up being against tobacco harm reduction. You look at the jobs that are employed in growing and curing and dealing with tobacco and making cigarettes. often the cigarette manufacturers are owned by the government so you're providing it's quite neat in some senses it's very it's it's clever i talked about being sophisticated actors you're basically providing arguments that the tobacco manufacturers the tobacco uh farmers and the and some of the treasury people within the government actually like so that you're even able to maintain or even expand the reliance on cigarettes in these countries. And that is to the detriment of public health. And so whilst you might have, you know, a BAT or a Philip Morris trying to make lighter, better filtered cigarettes, as well as alternative products, you know, some of these country manufacturers still have high tar cigarettes with minimal filters. And these, you know, these products are nowhere near, I mean, not that any cigarette is safe, but there are, There are cigarettes which are more benign, and there are certainly products out there, all of the tobacco harm reduction stuff we've been talking about, which are far more benign. So the low- and middle-income countries have definitely hit the hardest by the influence of Michael Bloomberg.
25:10 - 25:21
[Brent Stafford]
So when safer nicotine products are restricted or banned under this kind of framework, what happens in practice, and particularly in terms of illicit markets?
25:22 - 27:41
[Roger Bate]
Well, I mean, you know, it's classic, you know, when safer products are banned, some will move under market, but demand doesn't disappear. If demand, if there isn't, if there is, you know, if so, for example, in a country like Australia, wealthy, incredibly sophisticated decides to make an incredibly difficult to get product. vaping products, the market will be underground because everyone there knows about vaping. That isn't the case in some emerging markets. It may be in some where communication knowledge about the markets is better. But inevitably, the market moves underground. And so that's never good because you are... providing um you're providing soccer to the very worst actors in society whilst you know we can always have a view it's like the classic being a brit the classic uh underground movement goes back to like robin hood stealing from the rich and giving to the poor well most of the people operating in this kind of world they're not good people You know, they're just trying to find a market. But at the same time, they may be trafficking in vaping products, which we like, but they also could be trafficking in underage girls or arms or all sorts of other things. So you don't really want to be encouraging underground markets, and that's what's happening. You've got criminal supply chains, less safe products. I mean, some of the vaping products, whilst I'm pro-vaping, it's like they're not all equal. I'm sure there are poorly made products out there which could be dangerous, which is doubly risky because then all it takes is one person to die from a bogus vaping product and you have the entire media saying vaping is dangerous. In the same way that they would never do that if someone was drinking hooch from a still and they get methanol and they go blind as a result, you wouldn't blame anyone. Diageo or Ambev or one of these, the grand metropolitan people who are making smelt or vodka or whatever, you wouldn't suddenly blame them because someone's blinded by a hooch. But that's the argument that are made. Vaping is dangerous because someone was harmed by a rogue vape product. So you drive the market underground and that has all sorts of dangerous consequences.
27:42 - 28:06
[Brent Stafford]
Dr. Bate, the 13th edition of the Global Forum on Nicotine, the annual conference on safer nicotine products, takes place again this year in Warsaw, Poland from June 3 to 5. The conference theme is Prohibition and Public Health. In your mind, what are some of the solutions to address how prohibitionist thinking has come to dominate public health policy around nicotine?
28:08 - 31:08
[Roger Bate]
Well, firstly is, as my old statistics presser put it, you have to stoop to empiricism. Sometimes you actually have to look at what's working. We need to do a better job, we in the tobacco harm reduction, academia, whatever, policy space, to talk up the examples that we, you know, like New Zealand and Sweden and the UK before recent changes, but still, that have demonstrated unequivocally that tobacco harm reduction saves lives. We need a better modeling. Modeling can be problematic, but modeling that shows what would happen in other countries if you follow through with this. This is something I'm personally working on. And I think if we can do that, it's quite possible that um you know if with a change of leadership at the world health organization and a change of leadership potentially within the fctc secretariat that things could be reformed i think it's increasingly difficult philanthropic capture is now embedded institutionally within these things so it makes it very difficult um and who is is perceived as aligned with the donor ideology but Things can change. Towards the end of January, the United States will leave the World Health Organization. Its largest donor and most influential and historically sophisticated partner is leaving the organization. Argentina is actively considering doing it. Italy... Hungary, Slovakia, and at least seven other nations have abstained from signing onto the pandemic agreement, which was the follow-up to COVID and the WHO's power grab in this area. So the push for prohibitionist policy on tobacco, and more broadly, I would say prohibition of counter ideas has grabbed hold of the secretariats of the FCTC and WHO as a whole, but it is not without opposition. And I think the US leaving the WHO and other nations seriously considering doing it might leave to pause for change in direction. Also, there will be a new director general soon at the WHO. That person will have the opportunity to clean house and do and make change. So at the Warsaw nicotine event, I think discussing prohibition is very important because that's the status quo. But it doesn't need to be. It doesn't have to be into the future. And I think that the nations which have done a good job, I've mentioned them, Sweden, New Zealand, the UK and others, need to stand up and actually defend what they've done well and explain how it's worked. And so I guess I'm a born optimist, even though it's easy to be pessimistic when it comes to nicotine policy.