At the fag end of 2008, two experts look back at puffed-up claims about smoking bans and the ‘obesity epidemic.’
Two of the most cherished claims of the health lobby during 2008 have been that public smoking bans reduce smoking and that we are in the midst of an unending epidemic of overweight and obesity, particularly in children. We’re told that endless intervention by public authorities is required to save us from ourselves.
Authorities from Croatia to India introduced smoking bans this year, while many others extended bans to include such previously private spaces as cars. Meanwhile, high-profile campaigns to change our eating habits and restrict healthcare for the obese have also been popular this year with those keen to tell us how to live.
We know well that all of this is based on a colossal fraud, where health authorities knowingly lie to the public – and the truth is coming home to roost. Much more in this very interesting article from Spiked magazine.
When all seems lost and prohibition and health tyranny seem to be the way of the future, are we reaching a turning point where the scientific fraud becomes unsustainable and nobody believes the public health authorities anymore? Will the day come when those “authorities” will be tried for public fraud everywhere and put in jail, the keys thrown away as they deserve? Will their victims be compensated for all their sufferings? Will multifactorial epidemiology and other junk science be made illegal as a public policy base?
Those targets may be still far away, but thay are getting closer – and this is our whish for 2009. Do not despair. After all, just two years ago nobody would have bet a dime on the fact that the Great Fraud on global warming would start to lose ground, but it is happening. In that case too we wish many years of jail to the perpetrators, and no, a slap on the wrist just won’t do, as public fraud is one of the most serious crimes there is because it affects millions.
The essence of all this is that truth and justice must come back, in the health and environment institutions in particular, and in all institutions in general. The criminals must be punished. That is essential to reassure us all that there is justice, and to reaffirm the concept that crime does not pay after all – even when it is perpetrated in the name of health and environment.
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