Similarities between the tobacco industry and BPS/insurance interests

[rvallee]

Moved posts

I would go further. It wasn't bad science, it wasn't even non-science. It was anti-science.

Research on smoking tobacco funded by tobacco companies using tobacco company resources showing that, akshually, smoking tobacco is not only safe but a-muh-zing, comes to mind. Basically the same level of "independence".

Theranos provides a more recent example, and it also shows that high-risk investors have far more protections against blatant fraud than sick people. What a world we live in.

 

[Arnie Pye]

Research on smoking tobacco funded by tobacco companies using tobacco company resources showing that, akshually, smoking tobacco is not only safe but a-muh-zing, comes to mind. Basically the same level of "independence".

Theranos provides a more recent example, and it also shows that high-risk investors have far more protections against blatant fraud than sick people. What a world we live in.

A few days ago I came across an old (1950s?) photograph online of seven tobacco company presidents standing in a row holding up a hand in front of a Congressional Committee and swearing that tobacco wasn't addictive.

 

[Sean]

Sadly it was not that long ago (1994), and they phrased it as 'I do not believe that nicotine is addictive'.

 

[Arnie Pye]

Sadly it was not that long ago (1994), and they phrased it as 'I do not believe that nicotine is addictive'.

I'm surprised. The photograph I saw was black and white so assumed it was old for that reason.

 

[Sean]

Easy enough to mistake attitudes like this as coming from the 1950s.

 

[MeSci]

My mother died from lung cancer due to smoking, in 1960. I'm pretty sure that it was known that tobacco was addictive by then, because my father smoked as well but stopped when my mother was diagnosed.

 

[Ariel]

What do people make of the parallel between covid/long covid denial and minimization and the tobacco lobby? Didn't they get a bunch of "scientists" and doctors to say smoking was safe and NBD? Possibly even good for you in some way? It took a long time of growing evidence that it was unsafe and dangerous to convince the world at large. Seems similar to covid itself.

 

[Ash]

What do people make of the parallel between covid/long covid denial and minimization and the tobacco lobby? Didn't they get a bunch of "scientists" and doctors to say smoking was safe and NBD? Possibly even good for you in some way? It took a long time of growing evidence that it was unsafe and dangerous to convince the world at large. Seems similar to covid itself.

Yeah. I think it’s very similar with the idea that it’s possibly even good for you. Including the move to come up with “Imummunity Deficit” to explain mass illness with more complications and deaths, as a thing which comes about because people aren’t getting enough infectious disease rather than that it’s because they/we are getting one particular novel pathogen and we are experiencing a pandemic of this deadly viral disease.


But also it overlaps with all environmental diseases where by to effects are minimised by those who cause the pollution or don’t want to pay to safeguard people from it and this minimisation work is always facilitated by medical professionals to some extent or other.

 

[Ipquise]

Sadly it was not that long ago (1994), and they phrased it as 'I do not believe that nicotine is addictive'.

This is the height of cynicism.
And a lot of people believe it.