EU Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi posted an update on LinkedIn this week under the headline “New products, new risks: Europe’s tobacco rules must be fit for the future,” framing Brussels’ next move on tobacco and nicotine policy as protection for young people. In it, he claims the EU’s goal is a “tobacco and nicotine-free generation by 2040,” and that the European Commission is “consulting widely” so citizens can have their say on the future of tobacco control. 

Both claims are false, and both serve the same purpose: strengthening a narrative that lets the Commission justify restrictions on less harmful nicotine products it has been trying to impose for years.

The goal was never nicotine-free

Várhelyi wrote: “Our goal remains clear: a tobacco and nicotine-free generation by 2040.” Two paragraphs later, in the same post, one of his own bullet points describes the Commission’s plan as moving “closer to a tobacco-free generation by 2040”. If the goal was as clear as claimed, it wouldn’t need two different names in one LinkedIn post.

The real mandate comes from Le plan européen de lutte contre le cancer, adopted in 2021. It set a target of a tobacco-free generation by 2040, defined as under 5% of the population using tobacco products. Nicotine was never written into that target, for a simple reason: nicotine on its own doesn’t kill people, combustion does. Specifically, the combustion of tobacco in cigarettes, which produces the tar and toxicants behind most smoking-related diseases. Less harmful nicotine products break that link in different ways: heat-not-burn devices contain tobacco but don’t burn it, so they don’t produce smoke; vapes and nicotine pouches don’t contain tobacco or produce smoke at all. That’s the entire premise behind harm reduction.

It was Várhelyi himself who, in his own World No Tobacco Day statement in May 2026, rebranded a “tobacco-free generation” into a “tobacco and nicotine-free generation.” One Commissioner added a word, and with it, folded vapes, nicotine pouches and heated tobacco into a goal they were never part of. The effect is to treat every nicotine product as if it carried the same risk as a cigarette, when the entire evidence base on tobacco harm reduction says the opposite.

Science is wrong (according to Várhelyi)

In September 2025, Várhelyi tweeted que “nicotine…causes cancer.” Cancer Research UK, the FDA and the WHO all agree that nicotine itself is not a carcinogen: the cancer risk in smoking comes from burning tobacco, not the nicotine in it. After criticism, Várhelyi didn’t retract the claim. He edited it to say nicotine “contributes to cancer development,” a revision that still misinterprets the science.

But Várhelyi didn’t stop there. In a written response to MEP Kristoffer Storm, Várhelyi stated that smokeless nicotine products “do not reduce health risk” compared with cigarettes, a claim at odds with health authorities in the UK, France and Germany, and with the FDA, all of which recognise a substantial risk reduction for smokers who switch. And when the Commission needed evidence to back its position that new nicotine products carry risks “comparable to smoking,” the study it leaned on didn’t hold up either: tobacco researcher Peter Hajek pointed out that the paper contradicted its own cited sources, which found that nicotine products without combustion carry low risk compared with cigarette smoking.

“Consulting widely” (as long as everyone agrees)

Várhelyi also wrote that the European Commission “is consulting widely to ensure that citizens, young people, health professionals, researchers, public authorities, civil society and businesses can all have their say on the future EU tobacco control framework.” In practice, the consultation is built so that a response barely matters.

The consultation’s own questionnaire treats cigarettes, vapes, nicotine pouches and heated tobacco as a single category, as if they all carried the same risk. For anyone who understands the difference between smoke and vapour, that framing makes it structurally difficult to answer honestly. It reads less like a genuine consultation and more like a path toward a conclusion the Commission had already reached before it opened.

That has already happened at least once. When the Commission reviewed responses to an earlier round of consultation on this same framework, it ignored the roughly 89% of respondents who opposed further restrictions. If that’s what happened to public input last time, nothing in the current consultation’s design suggests this round will be treated any differently.

Brussels can’t have it both ways

UN “clear” goal and a “wide” consultation can’t both be true. If the target is already fixed, the consultation is a formality. If the consultation is real, the target should be able to change based on what people say.

Várhelyi’s post closes ironically with a hashtag: #EUHaveYourSay. But no number of submissions fixes a questionnaire built to produce one answer.