Coming to a COP conference near you soon.

Vital Strategies, one of the favored misinformation outlets funded with money from the World’s greatest opponent of reduced risk nicotine products, Michael Bloomberg, recently sent out a newsletter to subscribers.

Among calls to demand countries implement a “50% tax increase on harmful commodities like tobacco, alcohol and sugary drinks” which will punish the poor, the newsletter also celebrated “the recipients of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Awards for Global Tobacco Control.” These are they, 146 of them.

The organization warned that “newer nicotine and tobacco products”, that is, the ones which are helping people quit smoking, “are rapidly gaining ground” and that they are all willing and able to stop that from happening. 

The newsletter boasted that these “changemakers” have been fully trained (and funded) to go out into the wider world and bludgeon poor people into being poorer people for the sin of enjoying consumer products Mr. Bloomberg doesn’t like.

They will also have been brainwashed to believe that reducing harm for users of nicotine is a bad thing. Despite there being a highly-contested debate about the benefits or otherwise of tobacco harm reduction, none will venture a different perspective for fear of their grant money disappearing.

As usual, there was no declaration from Vital Strategies that all of those pictured have a significant conflict of interest (as does Vital Strategies itself). By accepting money from someone who refuses to balance the evidence surrounding reduced harm products, and who actively encourages messaging and programs which deliberately misinform the public, they should be disqualified from having any say in policymaking at all. One might describe it as political interference.

No doubt, many of these will also appear at COP11 in Geneva later this year. They will be united and speak as one, promoting the vested interests of a single ill-informed and unaccountable American billionaire. This is what buying governments looks like.

The WHO likes to peddle the notion that they are transparent, but this one picture proves that to be a fantasy. Are delegates at Framework Convention on Tobacco Control meetings aware of just how many observers at these meetings are essentially proxies for one unelected person, Michael Bloomberg? 

Copwatchers need only glance at the lists of accredited observers to COP10 to see that Bloomberg funded organizations dominate. At the same time, not one group representing people who smoke or who consume nicotine is allowed any access to delegations to put their case.

Here’s a thought. If attendees at WHO COP meetings want to claim to be transparent, perhaps they should insist that official observers at COP report their funding and the ideology of those who are funding them. 

It is the exact point of the concept of declaring a conflict of interest, after all.