The defective reasoning of Bloomberg's tobacco control activists
A short article reveals the weaknesses in the case for prohibition of smoke-free products advanced by Michael Bloomberg's proxies in middle-income countries.
I read many things that suggest the tobacco control establishment has lost its collective mind, especially the parts bought and paid for by the over-confident billionaire philanthropist, Michael Bloomberg. But it is rare to see an article that demonstrates this so concisely and completely as this:
Philippine Health Groups Want Full Tobacco, Vape Ban (Tobacco Reporter, 3 March 2026)
These health groups do not, of course, want a full tobacco ban... they only want non-combustible forms banned. Here is the Tobacco Reporter article in full.
Public health groups in the Philippines are urging the government to impose a total ban on e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products (HTPs), and other nicotine delivery systems, citing their health risks and rising youth uptake. The renewed push follows Myanmar becoming the eighth ASEAN country to enforce a vape ban, while Philippine lawmakers continue to debate tax rates for tobacco and vape products. Data show that around 14% of Filipino youth and 2% of adults use e-cigarettes.
Health Justice board member Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan said a comprehensive ban would offer the strongest public health protection, ensure regulatory clarity, and complement calls for higher, uniform tobacco taxes. Dr. Ulysses Dorotheo of SEATCA noted that a total ban would also help address tax administration challenges, curb illicit trade, and align with the Philippines’ obligations under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
For more background, see the Health Justice press release.
Smoking in the Philippines - some facts
First, a fact... The Philippines has 35% male smoking prevalence, 4.4% female prevalence and about 16 million people who smoke (WHO data). So this is not a country that is remotely close to solving the problem of smoking.
One way to look at the statistic “around 14% of Filipino youth and 2% of adults use e-cigarettes “is that youth are well on the way to moving on from the epidemic of smoking-related disease, but the problem is that adults are sticking with smoking - the exact opposite of the framing used by these activists.
The big idea
The big idea behind this “total ban” (a selective ban) is to make sure that smoking is the only legal choice available to current and future nicotine users and to make sure that no one reduces their risk other than by becoming abstinent or never starting to use nicotine in the first place.
The problem is that this just wishes away the persistent demand for the mild psychoactive effects of nicotine - pleasure, stimulation, mood modulation and cognitive effects. It does not matter whether health groups disapprove; they disapprove of many things. That demand is robust and likely to be permanent. That demand extends to young people who still take up nicotine use in the same way they may also take up alcohol, caffeine or other substance use.
The deficient reasoning
But I really want to focus on the reasoning as reported in the second paragraph of the article. It is almost offensive in its assumptions about the reader’s uncritical naivety.
“A comprehensive ban”
It is not comprehensive. It is not banning the products that are responsible for the health problem (smoking products), but is banning the safer alternatives that can address the health problem like protecting the virus and banning the vaccine.
“The strongest public health protection”
No, it degrades health protection. The proposed ban means the only legally available way to use nicotine will be the most dangerous. It purposely denies people (those currently smoking, and those who will take up nicotine use in the future) much lower-risk options. Presumably, they think that if these options are denied, then people will not use nicotine.
To “ensure regulatory clarity”
Being clear about doing something wrong does not turn a bad idea into a good one. However, we know that a ban does not provide regulatory clarity - it means that the products supplied are unregulated illicit products. No one knows to what, if any, standard these illicit products and their suppliers are held. A further twist is that removing regulation might appear to simplify it (at a risk to the public), but prohibitions shift the complexity from the regulator to the enforcer. Police, customs officials, port staff, trading standards, consumer protection bodies, etc., all become embroiled in detection, interception, and arrests, and in countering criminal networks, with vulnerabilities to violence, corruption, bribery, and extortion.
It would “complement calls for higher, uniform tobacco taxes”
Obviously, the government cannot tax products it has made illegal. The likely effect of a ban is to lower the true market price of these products by making them illicit and therefore not subject to taxation, quality standards, or other regulatory costs. But why would a health justice organisation want to have uniform taxation anyway? The tax system can be used to encourage behaviour change from high-risk to low-risk use of nicotine - and that applies to both current and future nicotine users.
It would “address tax administration challenges”
A prohibition certainly removes tax administration challenges, but only by rendering the products illegal and untaxable. It is quite likely that taxing such products at a risk-proportionate rate would cost more in administration than it would raise in tax. The answer is not to ban the products, but to make them available in a legal and regulated form without imposing taxes and tax-bureaucracy costs that exceed tax revenue.
It would “curb illicit trade”
A world-first policy innovation: a prohibition that reduces illicit trade. How does the prohibition of products that people want to use curb illicit trade? In fact, the prohibition creates the economic basis for illicit trade because it does not directly affect demand but ensures that demand can only be met by illicit supply. A criminal supply network can profit mightily by meeting the demand, so that’s what happens.
“Align with the Philippines’ obligations under the WHO FCTC”
The FCTC does not even apply to non-tobacco products like vapes and pouches, and certainly does not require them to be banned. At no point in the original text or in subsequent decisions does the FCTC create an obligation to ban any tobacco product, including the far safer heated and smokeless products. The FCTC does, however, specify its goal as follows:
Article 3: Objective
The objective of this Convention and its protocols is to protect present and future generations from the devastating health, social, environmental and economic consequences of tobacco consumption and exposure to tobacco smoke by providing a framework for tobacco control measures to be implemented by the Parties at the national, regional and international levels in order to reduce continually and substantially the prevalence of tobacco use and exposure to tobacco smoke.
See FCTC Text
The purpose of the FCTC is to reduce the health, social, environmental and economic consequences of tobacco use. In practice, that means reducing smoking as deeply and rapidly as possible within normal legal, practical, and ethical boundaries. The best way to do that is to migrate all recreational nicotine use to safer forms of nicotine products.
Who is making these arguments?
Specifically, quoted in the article…
Health Justice board member Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan
Dr. Ulysses Dorotheo of SEATCA
These arguments are not accidental or the rantings of rogue bloviators. They align with the policy preferences of the American financial services billionaire, Michael Bloomberg. The people giving these quotes are just two voices for the collective viewpoint of the complex of interests funded and influenced by Mr Bloomberg’s money. They are an expression of his ideas about what should be done in Low- and Middle-Income countries (LMICs) based on a set of simplistic ideas that are easily falsified by contact with reality (see above). These groups are not true civil society organisations; they are instruments of Mr Bloomberg’s global advocacy programme. I don’t want to discuss the individuals involved; I have no doubt they sincerely believe what they say, though I doubt they are ever challenged on it. It is more important to discuss the system that leads them to take this sort of public stand and represent that view through a public interest organisation.
In the golden age when Bloomberg Philanthropies was transparent about who it funded and what for (it no longer is), we can see that the HealthJustice Foundation received Bloomberg funding from 2010 to 2018 [Tobacco Control Grants - archived]. Bloomberg stopped disclosing who it funds after this time, so it is not easy to tell who funds it now. However, Health Justice compiled the Philippines report for the 2025 Bloomberg-funded Tobacco Industry Interference Index 2025.
The partners of Health Justice are the World Health Organization, the Department of Health, the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA), the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, the Global Center for Good Governance in Tobacco Control (GGTC), and the NCD Alliance. These organisations are all funded in some way by Bloomberg’s money, including elements of the Philippines government [see Bloomberg Exposed for Foreign Meddling in Tobacco and Vaping Policy in the Philippines].
The Global Centre for Good Governance in Tobacco Control (GGTC) is a joint initiative of the South-East Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA), and the Thammasat University’s School of Global Studies in Thailand. GGTC experts created the Tobacco Industry Interference Index, a survey of how public health policies are protected from the tobacco industry’s influence.
With the support of the Ministry of Public Health, Thailand, GGTC was designated by the FCTC Secretariat to serve as the Knowledge Hub on Article 5.3 to support implementation of the Convention’s obligation to protect against tobacco industry interference.
It could take months of frustrating work to unravel all the connections - financial, institutional and personnel - that create and shape even this single situation. But I guarantee that one man will be at the very heart of it.
Conclusion
You don’t have to look too hard below the surface to show that a campaign to ban safer alternatives to smoking in the Philippines is just the local operation of an American-based prohibition franchising system. That system runs from Bloomberg’s offices in New York via an impenetrable thicket of grantees, grant-giving intermediaries, alliances, partners, and fake civil society organisations.
So far, so awful: arrogant, unaccountable, ill-judged philanthro-colonialism.
What shocks me even more is that the utterly feeble reasoning and rationalisations used to justify these positions can somehow pass unchallenged, or more likely, never face the slightest scrutiny. Perhaps they just laugh off the challenge as “industry interference” and carry on regardless. All the money and intellectual capital involved, and this is what the Bloomberg complex comes up with. Yet in the Philippines, millions of lives and untold suffering are at stake.
The victims of such policies are the millions of people who would be left smoking cigarettes. The biggest beneficiaries are those in the cigarette trade. The advocates of these policies used to refer to such companies as merchants of death. Exactly why they think such enterprises are now worthy of market protection, and why this matters more than the lives of those they now seek to prevent from transitioning off their products, is a question in need of an answer.
Smoking is still the world’s most important preventable cause of death and disease. In a couple of decades, several excellent alternatives to deadly cigarettes have recently emerged as safer, smoke-free alternative nicotine dispensing systems. But as many of these options were developed by traded tobacco companies, they are anathema to big health which hates Big Tobacco more than it hates premature death among low-income smokers from lung cancer. Public health then began twisting itself in knots adopting a series of asinine and indefensible positions. Tobacco control has now reached a level of dishonesty achieved long ago by tobacco companies when they still denied smoking caused cancer. Enter US billionaire Michael Bloomberg with endless funding for public health activists willing to toe his tobacco/nicotine prohibitionist party line. The next development was Bloomberg establishing an international network of organisations which he secretly funded. Clive Bates spells all this out for us in an excellent commentary.