On 25 February 2026, an open letter was sent to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen by a group of senior European and international experts in medicine, toxicology, epidemiology, addiction science and public health. The title is blunt: False and misleading European Commission statements about novel nicotine product safety. And so is the message. For a Commission that demands accuracy and responsibility from others in the fight against misinformation, this represents a serious credibility problem.
The letter responds to a series of public statements by Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi in which he has repeatedly claimed that smoke free nicotine products including nicotine pouches are as harmful as cigarettes.
To be clear from the outset, the issue here is not whether nicotine products are risk free. No nicotine products should be described as harmless; such a statement would have been uncontroversial, correct and entirely expected from the European Commission. But that is very different from stating that these products are explicitly “as harmful”. This is not a mistake, a semantic nuance or a linguistic trick. In one interview, Commissioner Várhelyi went as far as saying he was “100% convinced”. This is a premeditated, repeated choice with severe regulatory consequences.
The signatories argue that these statements are not just questionable or exaggerated, but factually wrong, and that repeating them at EU level risks doing real damage to public health, to EU policymaking, and to trust in the institutions themselves.
The full letter can be read here:
Pouchforum has commented on further similar statements from Varhelyi here
What makes this letter stand out is not that it claims nicotine products are safe. It very clearly does not. Instead, it focuses on a distinction that is absolutely central to regulation but is increasingly blurred in political debate: the difference between not safe and not safer.
No serious scientist claims that nicotine use is risk free. But public health regulation has never been based on whether something is absolutely safe. Alcohol is not safe. Many foods are not safe at high doses. Most medicines are not safe without conditions. EU law is built on relative risk, proportionality and discrimination between different levels of harm.
When the Commission says that there are no safe levels of nicotine consumption and then uses that statement to justify treating smoke free products as equivalent to cigarettes, it commits a basic logical error. Something does not need to be safe in order to be dramatically safer. And in the case of smoking, the overwhelming share of harm comes not from nicotine but from combustion, from inhaling thousands of chemicals produced when tobacco burns.
This is not controversial science. The letter cites a long list of independent authorities including national risk assessment bodies, medical academies and public health agencies, all reaching the same conclusion: non combustible nicotine products expose users to far fewer toxicants and pose a small fraction of the risk of smoking. That does not make them harmless. It makes them relevant to harm reduction.
By collapsing not safe into not safer, the Commission effectively removes the entire basis for risk proportionate regulation. If everything is treated as equally harmful, then everything can be taxed, restricted and regulated in the same way. The result is predictable: cigarettes are protected from lower risk competition, substitution is discouraged, and public health outcomes worsen rather than improve.
The letter also places this debate in a wider EU policy context. Misrepresenting relative risk does not just affect communication, it spills directly into legislation. Tobacco excise, product regulation, cancer prevention strategies, cardiovascular policy and the internal market all rely implicitly or explicitly on an honest assessment of comparative harm. If that assessment is wrong, the policy built on it will be wrong too.
There is also an uncomfortable historical echo. The authors remind the Commission that the EU has made this mistake before. The ban on snus in 1992 denied most Europeans access to a far lower risk alternative to smoking, while Sweden, exempt from the ban, went on to achieve Europe’s lowest smoking rates. With the effects on the rest of Europe lacking this benefit in mind, the consequences of that decision are difficult to defend. The authors point to a well documented human cost and caution that nicotine pouches and other modern smoke free products may now be facing a similar disregard for evidence and relative risk.
What the signatories are asking for is not deregulation, and not cheerleading for nicotine. They are asking for something far more basic: that the European Commission sticks to the evidence, corrects demonstrably false statements, and allows future regulation to be built on an honest understanding of relative risk.
At bottom, the letter poses a simple challenge. The EU can choose a policy that genuinely targets smoking, the behaviour that kills, or it can slide into a blanket anti nicotine stance while pretending nothing has changed. But it should not claim scientific certainty where none exists, and it should not rewrite basic concepts like risk and proportionality to make that stance appear coherent.
We will see whether the Commission chooses to correct the record or double down.