A huge stuff up

Newsroom reports:

Leading anti-smoking campaigners say officials’ modelling wrongly suggested the Government’s plan would reduce smoking rates by 85 percent within five years

In a new review released early Monday morning, researchers from Action on Smoking and Health say the modelling underpinning the Government’s plan to mandate cigarettes be sold without nicotine is “significantly flawed”.

So this is ASH saying the Government is over hyping the impact of their proposed policy.

Modelling commissioned by the Ministry of Health and referenced in Cabinet documents and the bill’s Regulatory Impact Statement suggests the denicotinisation could be expected to reduce smoking rates by 85 percent within five years.

Youdan says this is based on a misreading of a clinical trial on the provision of nicotine-free cigarettes to people who wanted to quit smoking.

“The assumptions that they put into the model are massively overestimating the likely impact of that policy.”

The trial provided people motivated to quit with behavioural support. Some also received nicotine-free cigarettes, while a control group didn’t. Six months on, 28 percent of those in the control group said they hadn’t smoked in the past week, compared to 33 percent in the denicotinised group.

The Government’s modelling assumed that denicotinising all tobacco products in New Zealand would lead to a 33 percent quit rate each year and an eventual 85 percent reduction after five years, which Youdan says is erroneous for a number of reasons.

First, the nicotine-free impact in the clinical study was only 5 percent – the bulk of the quit rate came from the behavioural support provided to all participants.

This is a huge stuff up. Basically the impact of nicotine-free was to increase quit rates by 5%, not 33%. And they compounded the 33% figure to get the absolutely implausible figure of an 85% quit rate in five years.

The minister in charge of the Smokefree 2025 plan, Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall, said she hadn’t relied too much on the modelling in question when designing the policy and the findings wouldn’t have changed her decision-making at the time.

That is a farcical denial. Officials said hey Minister this will reduce the number of smokers by 85% in five years, and Verrall claims that was not a significant factor in approving the policy.

Given the findings of the review, ASH has asked the Government to have the modelling independently vetted and allow the most dependent smokers access to nicotine cigarettes in a controlled way.

Verrall said she would look at ASH’s review but suggested it probably wouldn’t change the Government’s direction.

“I always welcome scientific debate. I think, though, I am confident of the measures that we’ve got and I’m very pleased to be taking strong action to getting tobacco out of our community.”

This isn’t debate. The official advice was clearly wrong. And the so called strong action is in fact window dressing.

Good on ASH for putting the science first. If only the Government would follow the science.