Tobacco firms have bankrolled scientific papers playing down the risks of children vaping as part of a secretive lobbying campaign to boost e-cigarette sales and try to block public health measures aimed at protecting young people, a Times investigation reveals.
Doctors, scientists and “independent’ activist groups funded by or linked to multinational tobacco companies who sell e-cigarettes have been at the forefront of efforts to ensure Britain retains its liberal approach to vaping and doesn’t follow other countries in imposing bans, taxes or flavour restrictions.
Britain is facing an epidemic of youth vaping, with more than one in five children under 18 having tried an e-cigarette, a 30 per cent increase in a year. In October, a 12-year-old girl urged children never to start vaping — she had asthma and was a heavy vaper when she suffered a collapsed lung and was put into a coma for four days.
The government is consulting on proposals to tackle the rise in youth vaping, including potentially restricting sales of disposable vapes, increasing taxes and forcing vapes to be kept behind shop counters like cigarettes.
The investigation reveals:
• Cigarette manufacturers have funded research papers questioning the risks of youth vaping. They have then been cited as evidence in government consultation responses by tobacco-funded campaign groups.
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• Hundreds of British doctors have attended pro-vaping smoking cessation training sessions run by an NHS doctor who has taken millions in funding from Philip Morris International.
• Tobacco giant British American Tobacco helped run a “grassroots” campaign that presented itself as the voice of ordinary vapers, which has sought to influence government policy in apparent breach of global rules on tobacco lobbying.
Beneath a logo of a raised fist defiantly clutching an electronic cigarette, the World Vapers’ Alliance (WVA) bills itself as a grassroots organisation fighting for the rights of ordinary vapers.
The organisation has toured Europe with a “vape bus”, handing out branded merchandise and prizes including hats, mugs and umbrellas and urging users to write to MPs to push for pro-vaping policies as well as making its own attempts to influence governments.
In a recent response to a British government consultation on tackling youth vaping the WVA set out its opposition to proposals to restrict flavours and ban disposable vapes, hitting back at the suggestion e-cigarettes were damaging young people’s health.
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The seven-page submission cited scientific evidence, including a paper that found most vaping use among young adults was “infrequent and unlikely to increase a person’s risk of negative health consequences”, and another that concluded “a true gateway effect in youths has not yet been demonstrated”.
However, while it presents itself as the voice of ordinary activists, saying it is dedicated to “amplify[ing] the voices of vapers worldwide and empower[ing] them to make a difference in their communities”, the WVA has secretly been funded by large tobacco companies including British American Tobacco.
It is one of several tobacco industry-linked bodies who have been working in the UK to exploit public health messaging and push a pro-vaping agenda, a Times investigation reveals.
Tobacco industry-linked organisations have spent years playing down the risk of young people taking up e-cigarettes and challenging advertising restrictions, flavour bans and price increases — measures aimed at getting vapes out of the hands of under-age users.
The efforts appear to circumvent strict restrictions on tobacco industry efforts to influence public health policies and boost sales of e-cigarettes, which have become an important source of new customers and revenue for cigarette manufacturers.
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Scientists, doctors and campaigners with links to the tobacco industry have run training sessions for UK doctors, written scientific papers with favourable results, produced educational materials used by health organisations and taken part in political consultations.
The paper WVA cited on youth vaping was bankrolled by another tobacco giant, Philip Morris International, and co-authored by Peter Lee, a long-time tobacco industry consultant.
The paper discussing the risk of vaping to adolescents was led by Riccardo Polosa, who has provided consultancy services to British American Tobacco and runs a research centre which has received millions from Philip Morris.
For decades, the tobacco industry tried to cover-up the damaging health effects of smoking conventional cigarettes.
It did so using what became known as the “tobacco industry playbook”, a deliberate strategy of funding rival scientific research to cast doubt on scientific consensus, wielding huge financial resources to lobby and intimidate governments and using front groups to disguise industry messaging as grassroots activism.
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The legacy of this deception led to a landmark global treaty, which came into effect in 2005, prohibiting tobacco industry influence in public health. As a result, tobacco companies face strict restrictions on interacting with governments and officials and being involved in efforts to educate the public on health-related activities.
Nearly two decades later, with smoking in global decline, large tobacco companies have invested heavily in e-cigarettes and other alternative nicotine products including heat-not-burn technology and nicotine pouches. As they look to attract new customers for these products, they have sought to influence public habits by funding and developing links with third party groups and independent scientists and doctors.
At the same time, they have adopted the public health language of “harm reduction”, which advocates reducing the impact of risky behaviour for those who can’t stop and used it to attempt to overturn the restrictions imposed by the global tobacco control treaty.
Tobacco companies now present themselves as part of the solution to ending cigarette smoking, and hope this will allow them to reopen doors to influencing government policies, even as they continue to manufacture and sell billions of cigarettes.
E-cigarette campaigners are particularly focused on the UK because authorities have enthusiastically adopted pro-vaping policies, viewing it as a key tool for smokers to quit. Smoking cessation clinics hand out free vapes and some hospitals have vaping shops on their premises.
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By contrast, other countries have banned flavours or made vapes a prescription-only product. The World Health Organisation opposes their use, saying they are “undoubtedly harmful” and unproven as a method of giving up cigarettes.
The UK’s approach has been criticised by some public health experts who argued that it minimised the risk of non-smokers, including young people, taking up e-cigarettes and becoming addicted to nicotine. They have warned of possible damaging health effects on vapers’ lungs and cardiovascular systems and the unknown long-term consequences of vaping.
Industry-funded science
Cigarette manufacturers have funded dozens of scientific papers on the potential benefits of e-cigarettes and their possible health effects. These include several which challenge the conclusions of independent researchers on contentious issues, including whether youths who vape are more likely to take up smoking, something known as the “gateway effect”.
Peter Lee, an elderly British consultant living in Surrey, has worked closely with tobacco companies for decades and previously authored papers casting doubt on the link between secondhand smoke and serious diseases.
His 2019 paper, co-authored with two Philip Morris employees and funded by the company, concluded that the “gateway effect” had not been demonstrated.
It argued that even if it were proved this would only have a small impact on smoking prevalence and so the “overall population health impact of introducing e-cigarettes is still likely to be beneficial”.
Research by Professor Emily Banks from the Australian National University in 2020 “found clear evidence that non-smokers who use e-cigarettes are around three times as likely to take up conventional smoking as their peers who don’t use e-cigarettes”. Her team said the “findings support concerns that e-cigarettes are a gateway to smoking, especially among young people”.
As well as being cited by the World Vapers’ Alliance, Lee’s paper has featured in submissions by vaping enthusiasts to the European Commission and Irish health committee.
As the paper was co-authored with tobacco company employees, Lee said Philip Morris would have seen the paper and offered comments in advance of publication but “if they wanted to change a paper to say something that the data didn’t show I’d probably drop out of authorship”.
“I just argue everything on a scientific basis,” he said. “I see my life as a problem solver — I want to get to the proper answer to the problem.”
Philip Morris, which funded Lee’s work, said there was “large and growing body of independent, non-industry funded research that draws a different conclusion to Professor Emily Banks”.
Ian Fearon, another British consultant, has contested the alleged “gateway” effect in a paper funded by the tobacco company Imperial Brands, which sells MyBlu vapes. Fearon’s article, published in the journal Drug Testing & Analysis this year, concludes that there is “minimal evidence to suggest the existence of a ‘gateway’ effect to established cigarette smoking among never-smoking MyBlu users”. Imperial Brands said it had “no influence over any findings of any third-party research that we commission”.
A sector-wide analysis by Charlotta Pisinger of the University of Copenhagen in 2019 found that papers on vaping whose authors had a financial conflict of interest were “strongly associated with industry-favourable results” arguing “e-cigarettes are harmless”.
Lee has authored several papers with tobacco industry funding, including a 2022 analysis of a large US government tobacco survey for Philip Morris which concluded that e-cigarettes did help adult smokers to quit.
Many scientific journals ban articles with tobacco industry links so Lee’s 2022 paper was instead published in an online journal called F1000 Research which allows paying users to post articles and then submit them for peer review post-publication. Two of the people who subsequently peer reviewed Lee’s article and approved it worked as consultants to the e-cigarette industry.
Even when they are published in less prestigious journals, industry-funded papers can have a significant research impact. Sarah Cooney, a former senior British American Tobacco executive, boasts in her online CV of how, while working for the tobacco company: “I shepherded the most impactful article for the e-cigarette category from pre-submission to acceptance in one of the world’s top toxicology journals.”
She continued: “This article has been cited by others [more than] 200 times, and the full-text downloaded [more than] 30,000 times.” The paper by British American Tobacco employees reported on tests on the toxicity of aerosols from e-cigarettes and compared them favourably to cigarette smoke.
Activist groups
As well as funding scientific research which touts the benefits of e-cigarettes and has been used to assuage concerns about their use, the tobacco industry has developed ties with “independent” campaign groups that have pushed back at efforts to protect children by restricting vaping.
They have run social media adverts posing as grassroots campaigners and lobbied the government to oppose plans to bring in tighter regulations, arguing that the problem of youth vaping is overstated.
The World Vapers’ Alliance was set up in the United States in 2020 by the Consumer Choice Center (CCC), an advocacy group linked to libertarian networks funded by the industrialist Koch brothers.
The CCC has been funded by several of the world’s largest tobacco companies including British American Tobacco and Philip Morris.
British American Tobacco’s involvement with the WVA goes even further, with tobacco executives receiving regular briefings on the campaign’s efforts.
A source with knowledge of WVA’s campaign told The Times that senior employees at Red Flag, an Irish PR firm hired to work on the account, would report back to British American Tobacco’s global head of campaigns, Marcin Wiktorwitcz, and other executives to give updates on how the “campaigns [were] doing [and] trying to quantify if it was having an impact on EU legislators”.
They said the cigarette manufacturer viewed it as a “campaigning vehicle” which they used because “nobody’s going to listen to a tobacco company” arguing against regulations for products it sold.
It has previously been reported that British American Tobacco was also involved in “orchestrating, monitoring and funding” social media adverts placed by the WVA.
Staff at the WVA roadshows reportedly carried different types of stationery in order to make letters they asked visitors to write to pressure governments to oppose stricter regulations to appear “organic” rather than part of an organised PR campaign.
Red Flag said it was untrue that anyone else directed their work for WVA, which ended in 2021, while WVA insisted it retained “full control over our work and messaging”.
British American Tobacco said it “regularly engage with and support organisations” that contribute to relevant discussions, but these organisations “do not represent BAT’s views or positions”. The Consumer Choice Center said it had a “Chinese Wall between fundraising and editorial decisions” and that it had publicly acknowledged support from tobacco companies, including British American Tobacco.
Although it is based in the US, WVA spends significant resources on lobbying efforts in the UK and Europe. Britain is a key focus because it has adopted among the most favourable policies towards vapes around the world and the WVA’s director attended this year’s Conservative Party conference in Manchester to lobby against plans to ban disposable vapes.
The WVA says that it operates with complete autonomy, is a “consumer-driven movement” advocating for vapers’ rights and maintains full control over its work and messaging.
Influence in Westminster
Another key body is the Foundation for a Smoke-free World (FSFW) which has a declared mission to support research to end smoking and push harm-reduction policies.
Although it describes itself as an independent organisation, FSFW was set-up in 2017 by Philip Morris and has been bankrolled by the tobacco giant to the tune of almost $400 million — a connection that has meant many academics consider funding from the foundation to be tobacco industry money and refuse to work with it.
The foundation, which said Philip Morris, its sole funder, had no influence over its work, recently ended its ties with the tobacco company after accepting a final payment of more than $120 million. It intends to find non-tobacco donors and to change its name.
FSFW has handed out millions in grants each year, and has given more than £5.7 million, and pledged a further £4.5 million, to Knowledge-Action-Change (KAC), a company founded by British professor Gerry Stimson.
KAC, which said it was satisfied that the foundation was independent from Philip Morris and that it didn’t interfere with its work, organises the annual Global Forum on Nicotine, which has featured tobacco industry speakers as well as academics, campaigners and public health experts. It also runs a project which publishes briefing papers on tobacco harm reduction developments around the world. Stimson says that KAC does not pursue tobacco’s commercial interests and is frequently critical of tobacco companies.
Stimson was also the first chairman of a British campaign group, the New Nicotine Alliance (NNA), which advocates “reducing harm from cigarette smoking without necessarily giving up the use of nicotine”.
The NNA, which was set up in 2014, does not accept donations from vaping or tobacco companies but for a period had connections to Philip Morris through the KAC, which registered its website.
Stimson and another KAC director remained trustees of the NNA until 2019, two years after the KAC had begun receiving millions in FSFW grants. The NNA was also a member of an international network of nicotine consumer organisations for several years, including during a time when that entity was funded by FSFW.
During this period, the NNA collaborated with a cancer charity to produce educational material for smokers switching to e-cigarettes which encouraged them to experiment with flavours, try higher nicotine strengths and to have a second vape in case the the first one fails.
The NNA continues to echo tobacco industry talking points and cite work by tobacco industry-funded scientists in its position statements on vaping issues. Controversially, it has also argued that the World Health Organisation treaty should be altered to allow tobacco companies to partner with the government and local authorities on vaping initiatives.
It said it was driven solely by the “interests of consumers” and saw itself as “a consumer arm of the public health drive towards improved health for all nicotine users who are searching for a better alternative to smoking”.
Earlier this year, the NNA argued in a consultation response that the government “should be very wary of overreaction to experimental and rare regular vaping among adolescents” and has described youth vaping as a “moral panic” which risked derailing “sensible policies”.
Its submission in June 2023 said it was a “conspiracy theory that just because there are a variety of flavoured e-liquids available, it is proof of marketing to children” and claimed the “issue of environmental damage of vapes has been overblown”.
It challenged evidence on nicotine damaging the brain by dismissing the existing studies because they’ve been done on animals and said a ban on disposable vapes would be a “significant over-reaction to the exaggerated perception of harms to youth”.
Philip Morris said it is “clear that the best option is to never start smoking and for smokers to quit altogether, but the reality is most don’t quit” and so it was important to offer less harmful ways to consume nicotine.
Educating doctors
The Centre for Health Research and Education, bills itself as an “independent healthcare solutions company” focused on tobacco harm reduction and fighting childhood obesity.
It was set up by Sudhanshu and Pooja Patwardhan, a husband-and-wife team of qualified doctors living in an affluent Hampshire suburb.
Pooja is a registered GP working in the NHS while Sudhanshu previously spent 15 years working at British American Tobacco and its e-cigarettes spin-off company, Nicoventures, where his role included working to create a “KOL [key opinion leaders] ecosystem to facilitate smoking cessation and serve public health”.
Since setting up CHRE, the couple have run training on smoking cessation for doctors, appeared as speakers at industry conferences and produced materials advising clinicians on the use of nicotine replacement therapies and e-cigarettes by smokers looking to quit.
Sudhanshu has spoken at conferences on what he sees as the benefits of nicotine for mood management and spoken of CHRE’s mission to empower healthcare professionals to help their patients “make informed choices on safer nicotine alternatives”. CHRE routinely states that it “has not received any funding from pharmaceutical, electronic cigarette or tobacco industries”.
In fact, CHRE has received more than £6.4 million in funding from Philip Morris through FSFW for projects in the UK and India since March 2019, The Times can reveal. CHRE said it is satisfied that FSFW was independent from Philip Morris and its declaration that it hasn’t accepted tobacco funding is not misleading. It said the foundation had no influence over its work.
Pooja, who still works in the NHS as a GP and emphasises this experience when running training sessions, has lectured hundreds of doctors in the UK according to a now-deleted social media post from her husband. In a blog post, she has described her work “upskilling GPs and other clinicians on smoking cessation”.
One event, held for GPs in the Southampton area in February 2019, was advertised as “Smoking Cessation, Vapes and e-Cigarettes with Dr Pooja Patwardhan” and included a free lunch provided by a pharmaceutical company.
Other sessions have included teaching trainee doctors at Bournemouth University and a “GP refresher course” in Salisbury in September 2019.
She has claimed doctors are receptive to her message on encouraging the use of smoking cessation products because she is a fellow doctor, writing in 2020 that: “I have seen that when accurate information reaches them in a practice-friendly way from another clinician, they are very receptive and supportive of helping their patients quit smoking and manage cravings using the harm reduction principle.”
She has encouraged doctors to proactively send advice on smoking cessation options to patients. During the coronavirus pandemic, she wrote a journal article urging GP surgeries to send a text message or call all known current or former smokers with advice on avoiding a relapse. This advice included using e-cigarettes or other nicotine “cessation aids” to fight urges to smoke and increasing nicotine doses when needed. The article made no mention of CHRE’s funding from FSFW.
An article on the same subject for the Royal Society for Public Health included a CHRE-produced infographic on “smoking cessation tools” including e-cigarettes.
Pooja’s efforts have also included appearing on a media tour of local radio stations including BBC stations in Lancashire and Suffolk in June 2020 to discuss a survey carried out by the Philip Morris-funded FSFW.
Introduced as “a GP and medical director at the [CHRE]”, she made no mention of the links to Philip Morris as she discussed the increase in smoking rates during the pandemic and encouraged listeners to quit smoking, including through the use of e-cigarettes or other “safer nicotine” products including patches and gum.
In a statement, she said CHRE offered advice on all smoking cessation products, not just e-cigarettes, and this was consistent with “recommendations by UK’s national health bodies”. She said she always declared relevant interests when giving talks.
Calls for change
Dr Vinayak Prasad, head of the World Health Organisation’s No Tobacco Unit, said: “The tobacco industry is constantly using front groups and allies to change the perception of their deadly products and influence health policies.”
The organisation has launched a new “Stop the lies” campaign to highlight tobacco companies attempts to influence health policy, in contravention of a global tobacco control treaty. New research by the WHO has found that globally a higher proportion of children aged 13 to 15 had tried vapes than among adults.
Mark Hurley, a spokesman for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said: “Tobacco companies like Philip Morris and British American Tobacco have a long history of funding front groups to manipulate the public and advance their business interests at the expense of public health. Tobacco companies have funded ‘research’ that claimed the science was still out on the health impacts of smoking … it’s shameful that tobacco companies still think they can get away with it.
“Groups like the Philip Morris-funded Foundation for a Smoke-Free World are used to undermine life-saving public health laws around the world and to enable tobacco companies to insert themselves into public health policy. Far from being part of the solution, tobacco companies like British American Tobacco and Philip Morris are the main cause of the global tobacco epidemic that kills millions of people each year — full stop. If an organisation or research is being funded by a tobacco company, you can trust one thing only: that the aim is to further the interests of a deadly industry.”
Dr Raouf Alebshehy, managing editor of Tobacco Tactics at the University of Bath, said: “These incidents [are] the latest examples of the industry’s long history of using third parties and front groups, funding and publishing its own research, and attempting to manipulate science.”
He argued that “these tactics also blatantly contravene the tobacco control treaty, which explicitly requires governments to protect public health from the commercial interests of the industry”.
Deborah Arnott, chief executive of the anti-smoking charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH). said the “activities exposed by the Times are textbook tobacco industry attempts to influence public policy which failed before and will again”.
Sheila Duffy, chief executive of ASH Scotland, said: “Astroturf campaigning, which is hard to spot, is increasingly being used by the tobacco industry and its allies to create and amplify false perceptions of grassroots opinion being against proposed progressive health measures.
“Tobacco industry funding for campaigns helps to create a massive imbalance in the volume of government consultation responses that can be generated to drown out genuine community voices and health advocates’ concerns about the impacts imposed by their health-harming, addictive products on society.” She said these campaigns can “dangerously distort public health debates and delay or disrupt regulations to protect the profits of health-harming corporations”.
Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary, said: “Having ruined countless lives through smoking, Big Tobacco now looks to be using the same old playbook and getting a new generation of kids hooked on nicotine through vapes.” He called on Rishi Sunak to “start taking tough action to protect children’s health”.
Mark Hurley, a spokesman for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said: “Tobacco companies like Philip Morris and British American Tobacco have a long history of funding front groups to manipulate the public and advance their business interests at the expense of public health. Tobacco companies have funded ‘research’ that claimed the science was still out on the health impacts of smoking, among other ludicrous findings over the years. After decades of recycling this tactic, it’s shameful that tobacco companies still think they can get away with it.
“Groups like the Philip Morris-funded Foundation for a Smoke-Free World are used to undermine life-saving public health laws around the world and to enable tobacco companies to insert themselves into public health policy. Far from being part of the solution, tobacco companies like British American Tobacco and Philip Morris are the main cause of the global tobacco epidemic that kills millions of people each year — full stop. If an organisation or research is being funded by a tobacco company, you can trust one thing only: that the aim is to further the interests of a deadly industry.”
If you would like to get in touch with the reporting team behind this investigation, email [email protected]
This article was amended on December 18, 2023 to correct an error about goods handed out by the “vape bus” run by the World Vapers’ Alliance.
