Claims of “one hundred percent” certainty about the health impact of nicotine products by EU Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi should cause alarm in Europe’s public health community, argues Martin Cullip with The Taxpayers Protection Alliance. He argues absolute belief is no substitute for evidence, especially when lives are at stake.

In December, the news outlet Euractiv reported that the European Union’s (EU’s) Health Commissioner, Olivér Várhelyi, has declared himself “one hundred percent” certain that nicotine pouches, vapes, heated tobacco, and cigarettes all cause the same harm to health.

One hundred percent. Not mostly. Not broadly. Just absolute certainty.

A failure to understand science

This is not confidence. It is a confession that the man charged with safeguarding the health of 450 million Europeans either does not understand the science he cites or does not care whether his claims are true.

There is no scientific basis for the claim that non-combustible nicotine products cause the same harm as smoking. None whatsoever. No serious researcher, clinician, or toxicologist would make such a claim with a straight face.

There is no scientific basis for the claim that non-combustible nicotine products cause the same harm as smoking.

Smoking kills because burning tobacco produces a toxic mix of carcinogens and other poisons. Remove combustion, and you remove the overwhelming majority of harm. This is not controversial. It is basic public health knowledge.

Yet Europe’s top health official has chosen to dismiss this with ideological certainty.

Várhelyi attempted to justify his claim by citing a report on cardiovascular health in the EU, published under the responsibility of the Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Unfortunately for him, the paper does not say what he seems to think it says, and it certainly does not support his sweeping conclusion.

Várhelyi conflates smoking with nicotine exposure

The article presents no new data or original analysis. Instead, it advances the argument that nicotine itself is harmful to cardiovascular health, regardless of how it is consumed, and therefore all nicotine products should be regulated as if they were cigarettes. This position has already been widely criticised for conflating smoking-related harm with nicotine exposure and for contradicting a substantial body of existing evidence.

Nicotine can cause a brief rise in heart rate and blood pressure immediately after use, but these effects quickly subside and do not translate into established long-term cardiovascular harm.

In contrast, the evidence consistently shows that smokers who switch from combustible cigarettes to non-combustible nicotine products experience rapid and meaningful improvements in vascular function, with benefits appearing early after switching.

From ignorance to recklessness

Presenting all nicotine products as equally dangerous risks discouraging smokers from switching away from cigarettes, an outcome that would actively undermine public health.

This is where Olivér Várhelyi’s position crosses from ignorance into recklessness. When a Health Commissioner insists that safer alternatives are no safer at all, he is not merely wrong. He is dangerous.

His problem is a desperate willingness to believe anything that confirms his prior prejudice against nicotine. Evidence that contradicts this worldview is ignored. It is ideology substituting for science.

Why should the EU’s population tolerate this?

Since the EU banned snus in 1992, more than 20 million Europeans have died from smoking-related disease. Millions of those deaths could have been avoided had policymakers embraced harm reduction instead of prohibitionist dogma.

Instead, Europe has clung to a moral panic that has preserved cigarettes as the dominant nicotine product. The EU has congratulated itself on its virtue while millions have died.

Várhelyi’s fundamentalism threatens Sweden

Worse still, Olivér Várhelyi’s fundamentalism now threatens the one European country that proves harm reduction works. Sweden, uniquely exempt from the snus ban, has the lowest smoking rates in the EU and cancer rates roughly 40 percent lower than the European average.

These are real-world outcomes, not projections. Rather than learning from this success, Várhelyi appears intent on dragging Sweden into the same policy disaster as the rest of Europe. One suspects that this success is deeply inconvenient for him.

Várhelyi is set to oversee the next review of the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive in 2026. Allowing someone so demonstrably ignorant and ideologically captured to direct a process that will shape nicotine policy for decades would be a travesty. It would lock in misinformation at the highest regulatory level and condemn millions more Europeans to continued smoking and preventable disease.

This alone should disqualify him from office. For the sake of public health, Olivér Várhelyi should be removed immediately.

The science is not ambiguous. It overwhelmingly proves that Olivér Várhelyi is wrong. If EU policy is shaped by his personal convictions rather than by empirical evidence, the Union ceases to be a protector of public health and becomes its enemy.

‘Incompetent’ Várhelyi should be fired

Nearly half a billion people deserve to be governed sensibly. Instead, they are being lectured by a man whose certainty mirrors that of anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, and those convinced there are fairies at the bottom of their gardens.

Absolute belief is no substitute for evidence, especially when lives are at stake.

For the sake of public health, Olivér Várhelyi should be removed immediately.

The EU should fire this incompetent Health Commissioner and return to science-based policymaking. Health policy is not the place for fantasy, prejudice, or personal crusades. The cost of indulging them is not measured in headlines, but in lost lives.

Martin Cullip is an International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.