Emily Banks at COP11: A Masterclass in Selective Science and Moral Panic

Alan Gor 21 November 2025

If COP11 needed a demonstration of how ideology can hollow out science, Professor Emily Banks delivered it. Her speech, framed as “current evidence on the risks of e-cigarettes”, was less a scientific briefing and more an emotional appeal crafted to reinforce the WHO’s pre-determined anti-nicotine narrative. What she presented wasn’t a balanced assessment of evidence, but a political position dressed up as epidemiology.

And like the rest of the COP11 messaging, it relied on three tactics: exaggeration, omission, and the eternal villainisation of “industry” to avoid acknowledging policy failure.

1. Starting Point: The Assumption That All Nicotine Use Is Harm

Banks begins with a declaration that addiction itself is a “health harm,” full stop, essentially redefining the term to suit her argument. But if addiction is the sole metric of harm, then the entire foundation of harm reduction collapses. This is precisely why she pushes it: if nicotine dependence itself is defined as harmful, then even a 95% risk-reduced product can be treated as a public health threat.

This is moralism, not science.

For decades, leading addiction scientists have distinguished between dependence and harm the same way we do with caffeine, ADHD medication, or opioid substitution therapy. Banks collapse all nuance because nuance undermines prohibitionist ideology.

2. Painting Youth as Helpless Victims, While Ignoring Youth Smoking Declines

Banks repeatedly emphasises youth vulnerability, addiction risk, brain effects, and the notorious Surgeon General claims all arguments that have been highly contested, poorly replicated, or observed at nicotine doses far higher than in real-world vaping.

Crucially, she completely ignores:

• declining youth smoking rates in every market where vaping is legal

• the complete failure of restrictive models like Australia, where youth vaping rose despite bans

• the fact that the majority of youth experimentation is not sustained, dependent use

Banks speaks as though young people are passive objects being manipulated into lifelong addiction, yet global evidence shows that most youth vapers do not become adult smokers. In fact, in countries with regulated vaping (UK, NZ, US), youth smoking has reached record lows.

Why wasn’t that mentioned?

Because it contradicts the narrative that vaping increases youth nicotine addiction “unless controlled.”

3. The Illicit Market Exists But She Pretends It’s a Reason For More Prohibition

Banks briefly acknowledges that a “significant proportion” of the market is illicit, but she presents this as a justification for stricter regulation, not as evidence of the utter failure of strict regulation.

This is intellectual gymnastics.

The countries with the largest illicit markets, Australia, India, and Thailand, are the same countries with strict bans. Instead of treating illicit supply as a predictable consequence of prohibition, she uses the illicit market as rhetorical fuel for… even more prohibition.

No mention of:

• contaminated illicit liquids

• high-nicotine black-market disposables

• youth access is created because legal channels are eliminated

• the fact that Australia’s vape black market exploded after her preferred policies were implemented

It’s a perfect example of circular logic:

Prohibition created the problem. Therefore, we need more prohibition.

4. Fearmongering Through Worst-Case Scenarios

Almost every claim relies on conflating rare or unrelated harms with typical vaping behaviour:

• battery explosions (extremely rare and preventable with regulation)

• EVALI (caused by illicit THC vapes, not nicotine e-cigs)

• poisonings from high-strength liquids (which occur overwhelmingly in toddlers ingesting household products)

• thousands of chemicals (as though quantity equals toxicity, it doesn’t)

This is a classic tobacco-control communication strategy: cite scary anecdotes instead of population-level risks.

Meanwhile, she completely avoids:

• the Royal College of Physicians’ conclusion that vaping is dramatically safer than smoking

• UK Cochrane reviews showing vaping is the most effective quitting tool

• evidence that youth vaping displaces smoking, not fuels it

• biomarkers showing massive reductions in carcinogens and toxicants among people who vape

What kind of scientific presentation presents only one side of the evidence?

A political one.

5. “We’ve Been Successful”: A Claim That Collapses Under Data

Banks claims the tobacco-control movement has been “successful,” and that industry denial of this is what led them to develop reduced-risk products.

This is revisionism.

If tobacco control had truly “succeeded”:

• smoking rates wouldn’t have plateaued in Australia

• young adult smoking wouldn’t have risen post-vape ban

• illicit tobacco wouldn’t be exploding

• cigarette tax revenue wouldn’t still be climbing

• 8 million people wouldn’t still die globally each year

Vaping didn’t emerge because tobacco control “succeeded.”

It emerged because it failed to help millions of people who can’t quit with traditional methods.

6. “84% Don’t Smoke”: Another Misleading Framing Trick

Banks shows a slide claiming 84% of people globally don’t smoke, implying that vaping threatens this fragile majority.

She doesn’t mention:

• smoking prevalence varies massively by region

• over a billion people still smoke

• most youth vapers have never smoked because youth smoking has plummeted

• the 84% includes infants and the elderly

• vaping uptake remains comparatively small in most countries

It’s a misleading denominator trick using the full human population to downplay the scale of global smoking harm while inflating the scale of youth vaping.

7. The Obsession With “Industry” as a Scapegoat for Bad Policy

Her speech is filled with references to:

• Big Tobacco manipulation

• shareholder slides

• “stimulating senses of young users”

It’s a convenient villain, but her framing ignores a critical reality:

Most of the global vaping market is not owned by cigarette companies.

It is independent manufacturers, SMEs, and small retailers.

Ironically, WHO-style prohibition empowers the cigarette industry by wiping out its competition, the harm-reduction products that threaten cigarette sales.

Banks never mentions that.

Because it reveals the awkward truth:

Her policies help Big Tobacco, not weaken it.

8. Her Conclusion Reveals the Real Agenda: End Nicotine Use Itself

Banks ends with a clear message:

• safer alternatives are unnecessary

• vaping is non-essential

• nicotine addiction must be eliminated entirely

• strict regulation or prohibition is “what works”

This isn’t tobacco control anymore.

It’s nicotine abolitionism.

It has nothing to do with comparative risk, adult autonomy, or lived experience.

And when ideology demands the eradication of nicotine itself, harm reduction becomes impossible by definition.

This is why she and the WHO refuse to differentiate between:

• smoking vs. vaping

• combustion vs. aerosol

• risk reduction vs. risk elimination

• adult use vs. youth use

• licit vs. illicit supply

Everything gets flattened into one message:

Nicotine bad. Ban it.

Emily Banks’ Speech Is a Blueprint for Anti-Harm-Reduction Propaganda

Her COP11 presentation:

• ignores real-world data

• inflates risks

• erases harm-reduction evidence

• misattributes blame

• reinforces WHO ideology

• denies adult agency

• reframes addiction to suit a policy goal

• treats prohibition as the default, not the failure

• insists youth vaping is exploding even in nations where it’s falling

• conflates legally regulated products with illicit, contaminated ones

In short:

It’s not epidemiology. It’s advocacy.

And worse, it’s advocacy that harms the very people it claims to protect.

When smoking kills 8 million people a year, the refusal to embrace safer alternatives isn’t neutrality.

It’s negligence.