Peter Beckett at Purifier l'air uncovered something that Brussels hoped nobody would notice. The European Commission’s evaluation of the Tobacco Products Directive, the report that is supposed to form the legal foundation for the biggest revision of EU tobacco law in over a decade, was reviewed by the Commission’s own internal quality control body before publication. That body, the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, gave it a negative opinion. The Commission published it anyway.

The RSB is not an outside critic. It is the EU’s own watchdog, set up specifically to ensure that Commission reports are based on solid evidence and that conclusions do not go beyond what the data supports. Its verdict on the TPD evaluation was unusually blunt. The evidence base was insufficient. The effectiveness analysis was not robust. And the conclusions that EU tobacco policy reduced smoking, that vaping and nicotine pouches are dangerous, should not go beyond what is supported by evidence.

In other words, the Commission is claiming things they cannot prove.

The Commission’s response was to publish the report on 2 April, the day before the Easter weekend anyway, and to leave the RSB’s negative opinion off the webpage entirely. It took a Freedom of Information request from Beckett’s team to force the Commission to add it. It appeared quietly on 9 April with no announcement. As Beckett noted, it was a textbook exercise in burying bad news.

This matters beyond the procedural embarrassment. The TPD revision will determine whether millions of European smokers can access vapes, nicotine pouches, and other less harmful alternatives that are genuinely helping people quit. The Commission wants to restrict them. Its own watchdog says the evidence base for that direction is not good enough.

And it is not only the RSB pushing back. This week, seven consumer organisations from across Europe, including the World Vapers’ Alliance, sent an une lettre ouverte to Commission President von der Leyen and Health Commissioner Várhelyi, calling on them to apply a risk-proportionate framework, protect adult access to less harmful alternatives, and learn from countries like Sweden, Czech Republic, and Greece that slashed smoking by embracing harm reduction rather than restricting it.

The Commission is now facing the same verdict from two entirely different directions. Its own internal watchdog says the evidence does not support the report’s conclusions. Consumer organisations across Europe say the policy direction will cost lives.

Brussels is ignoring both. The TPD revision is still being built on this foundation. And that should concern everyone who wants EU tobacco policy to be driven by what actually works rather than by what the Commission had already decided before it started writing.