Eräässä haastatella published yesterday by Euractiv, Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi said he hopes the EU’s tobacco and nicotine tax overhaul will be “agreed as part of the MFF package,” adding that “otherwise, health budgets are not going to receive the contribution they deserve.” Asked about novel nicotine products, he repeated that “I stand by” the view that they are as harmful as cigarettes, crediting the evaluation of the EU’s tobacco control framework for confirming it.

The tax push is a budget manoeuvre dressed up as a health measure, and the evaluation he cites says something closer to the opposite of what he claims it says.

A health tax that funds everything except health

Várhelyi has repeatedly framed the Tobacco Excise Directive (TED) revision as a health necessity, but the reason he needs the TED agreed this year has nothing to do with public health. It is tied to the Multiannual Financial Framework, the EU’s seven-year budget, where tobacco excise has been proposed as a new “own resource”: a mechanism (TEDOR) that would call 15% of Member States’ tobacco excise revenue, worth an estimated €11.2 billion a year, directly into the EU budget.

That revenue does not go to health programmes either, as Várhelyi claims. Tobacco and nicotine excise duties are collected by Member States and spent through their national budgets, exactly as it is now. The MFF proposal doesn’t redirect it to health, it skims a share of it to fund the EU’s general spending. Várhelyi’s own framing gives this away: he is warning that “health budgets” will lose out unless the tax is agreed as part of the MFF.

Still equally harmful

Asked whether his “conviction that novel nicotine products are as harmful as tobacco” will shape the revised Tobacco Products Directive, Várhelyi answered: “I stand by that.” 

We’ve catalogued this pattern before: a tweet claiming nicotine causes cancer, a quiet rebrand of the EU’s “tobacco-free” target into a “tobacco and nicotine-free” one, a debunked study used to justify treating novel products as “comparable to smoking,” and a public consultation that ignored 89% of respondents who opposed further restrictions the last time round. This just confirms that no amount of contrary evidence is going to change the Commissioner’s script.

The evaluation he’s citing doesn’t say what he says it says

Várhelyi’s evidence for equal harm is “the evaluation,” meaning the Commission’s own Staff Working Document assessing the EU tobacco control framework, published in April. But that evaluation doesn’t treat cigarettes, e-cigarettes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches as a single risk category. It treats them as different products with different regulatory gaps. That concern only makes sense if the underlying products carry a different risk profile in the first place.

The Joint Research Centre studies that fed directly into that evaluation say so explicitly. The JRC’s own summary of its research states that e-cigarette use “appears less harmful than conventional tobacco,” even as it flags separate concerns around unclear long-term toxicity. It describes nicotine pouches as delivering fewer toxicants than smoked products, while noting the evidence base is still thin. That is the science underpinning the evaluation Várhelyi says confirmed his view.