Second-Hand Smoke and COVID

      "This publication will deal with the so-called public smoking issue. . .. If left unchecked anti-smoking 'zealots' and 'fanatics' could bring about an almost total ban on smoking."

                   Chairman, Reynolds Tobacco, 1976

The tobacco companies fought back against complaints about "second hand smoke."

In the late 1970s and 1980s tobacco companies recognized a threat to their business. Second-hand smoke was beginning to be described as a public health hazard, endangering bystanders. They fought back. They argued that smoking tobacco was a right, a matter of personal choice, and that people trying to ban smoking in customary places were tyrants. The tobacco companies had a motivated base of supporters. They smoke and they vote. Smokers had the power of intensity. People who preferred not to be around smokers cared less strongly than did smokers who wanted to continue smoking. The right not to experience second hand smoke was less developed in law and custom than the right to smoke nearly anywhere, anytime, and any place.

In the 1980s tobacco companies created free-distribution magazines to promote their point of view, and a content analysis of it will seem familiar and very current. A 1995 academic article in the Journal of Public Health published an analysis of 58 issues of several smokers' rights publications, 1987-1992.  Click: PDF

To address the overall perceived threat to smokers the publications presented "individual rights, choice and freedom as the ideal."

The publications' intent to undermine the opposition was done by citing questions regarding "scientific evidence related to the health hazards of environmental tobacco smoke." Maybe others weren't really affected. Who knows? The publications attacked the motivations of people promoting no-smoking areas.

Publications encouraged readers to oppose unfair discrimination about public smoking. They were victims. Instead, they urged "accommodation, tolerance, common sense, and courtesy as a rational alternative to government intrusion, rights infringement, and restrictive nonsmoking policies." People concerned about second-hand smoke should back off mandates. Let people choose not to smoke around you.

Over the past 40 years the smoke-anywhere movement lost ground. Now the default cultural and legal presumption is that bystanders are protected from second-hand smoke. Public complaints about smoking in restaurants, and lawsuits over workplace safety for employees experiencing second-hand smoke hastened the switch. Over the decades American culture shifted the balance of whose rights were primary--smoker or bystander. Some minds were changed. People formerly smoked in airplanes and in hospitals, now it is unthinkable. The population changed, too. Old people with old expectations died; young people have never experienced a world in which smokers smoked indoors in public places.

Tobacco kills, but it kills people slowly, in a hit-or-miss fashion, with ambiguity about other potential causes, and it tends to kill people who are old enough that their deaths are not unexpected. Everyone dies. Tobacco sometimes--not always--accelerates the timing of the death. COVID appears to act in a similar way, with some hits and misses among the young, but primarily accelerating the time of death for the vulnerable and elderly. The result is that people inclined to ignore the risks of both smoking and COVID have anecdotal evidence to support their point of view.

Trump and the GOP did not need to invent a strategy to dismiss COVID as an over-reaction by the nanny stated. A familiar template existed in the second-hand tobacco battle: Call it a matter of choice and rights and the proponents tyrants.

 A familiar template also exists on the other side, for increasing the vaccination rate. Increase the overall "cost" of being unvaccinated. Government and private businesses have an interest in the safety of customers and employees. If unvaccinated people are inconvenienced by higher insurance premiums, by frequent testing, by job loss, or are banned from airplanes or sporting events--the COVID equivalent of standing outside in the rain to smoke--then people may decide that vaccination avoidance just isn't worth the hassle. Heads up to Democrats, though. It took two decades.