The European Parliament passed in plenary today its response to the Commission’s Safe Hearts Plan, the EU’s first cardiovascular health strategy. The report itself is mostly about blood pressure targets, cholesterol screening and access to cardiac care. But buried inside it is a section on tobacco and nicotine that matters directly to vapers and pouch users, and it looks meaningfully different from where the file started.

The report began life as a draft in January, written by Croatian socialist rapporteur Romana Jerković for the Committee on Public Health. The Committee adopted its amended version on 24 June by 38 votes to 2. Plenary gets the final say next week. 

In the months between draft and adoption, several policymakers involved in shaping the file, including people close to the report itself, heard directly from WVA and others making the case that any EU line on nicotine products has to track the actual risk profile of the product, not lump pouches and vapes in with cigarettes by default. Some of that case seems to have landed.

Flavour bans went from a given to a maybe

The January draft treated flavour bans as settled policy, listing them alongside nicotine limits and taxation as things regulation “should” include. The adopted text softens that to something conditional: measures “may include, where relevant, bans on flavours, which are particularly attractive to minors and non-smokers” (para. 19). Although flavour bans have no real justification at all, that’s a real shift, from an assumed tool to one the Commission still has to argue over case by case.

Two entirely new paragraphs that weren’t in the draft at all

Two of the more consequential lines aren’t edits to the January text, they’re additions that didn’t exist before. The adopted report calls for smoking cessation strategies to be “strictly aligned with scientific evidence and shaped in line with the independent advice of the scientific community” (para. 21), and it states that “nicotine content levels and delivery methods vary across products, and that different nicotine products may therefore have differentiated risk profiles” (para. 22). That second line is the closest the Parliament has come in this file to acknowledging what the science on nicotine pouches already shows: not all nicotine products carry the same risk. It’s worth being precise about what it says, though. The same paragraph adds that “all such products still present health risks,” so this isn’t Parliament calling pouches safe, it’s Parliament conceding they aren’t all the same.

A harder look at whether the EU is on track

The adopted text also names the 2040 target directly, the goal of a tobacco-free generation with under 5% of the population smoking, and adds a line the draft didn’t have: it “notes with concern that current smoking rates in Europe risk undermining this objective” (para. 25). That’s the Parliament acknowledging, in writing, that the current approach isn’t working fast enough.

What this means for vapers

None of this makes the Safe Hearts Plan a harm reduction document. The report still states elsewhere that e-cigarettes “pose significant cardiovascular risks” and repeats the WHO line that it doesn’t recommend e-cigarettes as a cessation tool. Nobody should read this as Parliament is coming around to switching. What it does show is that the file moved, on flavours, on differentiated risk, on evidence-based cessation policy, in the months where policymakers were actually being pressed on the details. 

That’s the argument WVA made in meetings with people shaping this report: that regulation should follow the risk profile of the product, not a blanket assumption that all nicotine products are the same. The plenary vote next week won’t settle the bigger fight, that’s the Tobacco Products Directive revision still to come, but it’s a sign that the evidence-based argument is getting a hearing where it used to get dismissed outright.