Follow the vast sums of money

'Public health' is a racket

The older I get, the more I think that the whole ‘public health’ enterprise is a racket funded by unwitting taxpayers to make talentless academics rich. When I started doing the research for Velvet Glove, Iron Fist nearly 20 years ago, I was interested in knowing what kind of people dedicate their lives to stopping other people smoking. I was expecting to find eccentric characters and religious fanatics and for the first 400 years after tobacco arrived in Europe that’s pretty much what they were, but since the 1990s they have all been fully salaried professionals just doing their job. It may have been a job that they believed in, but if they got a better offer they would be doing something else.

Some of them did go on to do something else. Mostly, they went on to campaign against alcohol, sugary drinks and - more recently - ‘ultra-processed food’. A lot of them are now gearing up to campaign against gambling because that’s where the money is.

I don’t know if my growing conviction that whole thing is a self-serving grift is because I have become more cynical over the years or because the racket has become more obvious, but it has certainly become more obvious. Take this announcement yesterday, for example.

£8M secured to improve population health at local level in the UK

A major research project led by the University of Bath has been funded to investigate the under-researched issue of how the commercial sector influences public health at the local level and what can be done to harness positive impacts and address the negative impacts. It brings together researchers, NGOs, public health professionals, local people and local government for the first time to do this.

The eight million pounds comes from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), i.e. taxpayers. UKRI was created in 2018 to “push the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding” but it soon became yet another slush fund for activist-academics.

The team comprises researchers from the Universities of Bath, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Sheffield and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine plus partner organisations including the Association of Directors of Public Health, the Centre for Thriving Places and an NGO consortium made up of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), the Obesity Health Alliance (OHA) and the Alcohol Health Alliance (AHA).

Note that the last three of these are pressure groups, plain and simple. The line between activism and academia in ‘public health’ is not so much blurry as non-existent and they’re not even trying to hide it. The conclusions of this ‘research’ are so predictable that they might as well spaff the £8 million on a big party and give us them now. They will say that it’s the alcohol industry’s fault that people drink themselves to death, it’s the food industry’s fault that people get fat and it’s the gambling industry’s fault that people develop gambling problems. They will claim that there are unfeasibly large ‘societal costs’ associated with all these industries and that their products should be treated like tobacco, i.e. hyper-regulated and eventually banned. They will portray obvious objections to stupid policies as ‘industry arguments’ and depict normal political engagement as ‘industry tactics’. It will be a cut and paste job with some waffle about ‘empowering’ local councils crowbarred in to justify the grant.

Anna Gilmore, Professor of Public Health and Co-Director of the Centre for 21st Century Public Health, will lead the four-year project. She said: “We are delighted to have been awarded this funding. So many entirely preventable deaths occur each year linked to the products and practices of major corporations.”

Anna Gilmore has her finger in so many pies that it is difficult to keep up. She made her name back in the day by pretending that England’s smoking ban reduced the number of hospital admissions for heart attacks. Having demonstrated that she will say anything for money, she was made a professor and spent the 2010s in a flurry of activity, displaying an extraordinary degree of ineptitude in a range of disciplines, including economics. She became director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, an organisation that received millions of pounds from the (state-funded) UK Clinical Research Collaboration despite doing no clinical research. Spotting new funding opportunities, the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies became the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies in 2013. She has since branched out into ‘research’ on fossil fuels which she says, not unpredictably, should be subject to ‘tobacco control style regulation’.

In 2018, she got $20 million from Mike Bloomberg to set up an ‘industry watchdog’ and in 2019 she got a grant from SPECTRUM to research ‘unhealthy commodity industries’. SPECTRUM is the preposterous acronym for Shaping Public hEalth poliCies To Reduce ineqUalities and harM. It was funded to the tune of £5.9 million by the UK Prevention Research Partnership, a largely taxpayer-funded body created in 2017 to provide yet another source of cash for nanny state quackademics.

Gilmore is also the co-director of something called the Centre for 21st Century Public Health which doesn’t have much to say about itself but is more than likely paid for by you and me.

All these organisations do essentially the same thing and now she has another £8 million to do it again but with a slant towards local government.

The £8 million is part of a £35 million package devoted to ‘Population Health Improvement’, but it looks like at least half of it will be spent ensuring that anti-capitalist academics can buy a second home. In a further announcement yesterday, there was another familiar name celebrating her lottery win.

Professor Petra Meier brings expertise to UKRI’s new £35m Population Health Improvement UK

Professor Petra Meier, from the University of Glasgow’s School of Health and Wellbeing, will lead on one of the four initial PHI-UK investments: the £7.5m Enhancing Policy Modelling theme, which will look at how better economic policies can help tackle the UK’s growing health inequalities.

The career of Petra Meier is a stunning example of how the gravy train works. In the late 2000s, she set up an alcohol research group at Sheffield University and got grants from various governments to produce modelling that supported minimum pricing. The modelling was garbage and, by her own admission, she was not an expert on alcohol, but that was where the money was.

“My foray into the alcohol world started with taking up a lectureship at the University of Sheffield. Not that anyone there was doing alcohol research at the time, but I was suddenly in a very research-active environment, and there was an expectation that we would identify a niche and quickly bring in grants. My previous research had focused on illicit drug use, but it seemed there were far more opportunities in alcohol research.

My new department was full of systematic reviewers and health economists, so we tried our luck and got funding for a project reviewing and modelling alcohol pricing and promotion policies.

Having literally no clue whatsoever about alcohol policy in the United Kingdom, or elsewhere, I remember how a colleague and I, desperate for some expert input, trawled the web and kept finding the names ‘Robin Room’ and ‘Tim Stockwell’.”

In 2019, Meier landed £6.6 million from the UK Prevention Research Partnership to set up SIPHER which, like SPECTRUM, is a vaguely sinister name and a dubious acronym (it stands for Systems science In Public Health and health Economics). SIPHER claims that it exists “to create evidence-based products [sic] that influence public policy process” and employs many of her old friends from Sheffield Univeristy.

Meier is also the Co-Principal Investigator at GALLANT (Glasgow as a Living Lab Accelerating Novel Transformation) which describes itself as follows…

GALLANT aims to deliver the social priorities of the UN Sustainable Development Goals while remaining within the planetary boundaries of a 1.5°C world - using doughnut economics as a framework. 

GALLANT was founded in 2022 with £10.3 million from the taxpayer, this time via the Natural Environment Research Council. Doughnut economics is trendy nonsense that is popular in the public sector.

Incidentally, one of SIPHER’s ‘co-investigators’ is Greg Fell. We came across Mr Fell earlier this month when he was celebrating his victory in Sheffield where advertising on council-owned billboards is now banned for a wide range of products including foods deemed to be high in fat, sugar and salt, “fossil fuels-related brands”, airlines and airports, petrol, diesel and hybrid vehicles, food ordering services, “certain breast or infant milk formulas”, alcoholic drinks, “low/zero alcohol drinks from brands synonymous with alcohol” and payday loans.

Arguably Britain’s most pointless man, Fell is not only Sheffield’s director of public health but also the president of the Association of Directors of Public Health, a organisation that receives money from the government despite representing some of the most lavishly paid people in the public sector. He was celebating again yesterday because the Association of Directors of Public Health has been invited to share in the £8 million slush fund to tackle what he calls “health-harming industries”.

With the exception of the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies and the UK Clinical Research Collaboration, every organisation mentioned in this post was created after 2010, including the grant-making bodies that are dishing out the money. It is sometimes said by people on the right that austerity never happened and insofar as the state is spending more money now than it did 14 years ago, they have a point, but that is largely because the government has been showering pensioners and the NHS with cash. In other parts of the state, there really have been cuts and that is partly why nothing seems to work anymore. Frontline services are crumbling and yet there seems to be a bottomless pit of money for low-grade academics to build their little empires and publish idiotic research (see this post by Charlotte Gill for some comic examples). In ‘public health’, a relative handful of thinly disguised activists have been draining the taxpayer of millions of pounds, year after year, and no one seems to want to anything about it. I call that a racket.