Study results warrant tobacco industry-wide corporate death penalty as the U.S. CDC estimates tobacco will kill twice as many Americans as the COVID-19 pandemic

HOUGHTON, MI, US, April 1, 2020 /EINPresswire.com/ -- A recent study calls for a tobacco industry-wide corporate death penalty as the CDC predicts that tobacco will kill between two times to four times as many Americans as will die from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, and Dr. Deborah Birx, warn that even with blanket nationwide adoption of stringent mitigation efforts, many Americans will die from the COVID-19 pandemic. In a press conference yesterday they estimated between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans will die from COVID-19.

However, America currently faces more than one pandemic and epidemic. The World Health Organization has long referred to the “tobacco epidemic”, because it kills more than 8 million people globally each year.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms that the tobacco industry is responsible for the deaths of 480,000 Americans every year. Of those deaths 41,000 Americans die of secondhand smoke with over 7,333 secondhand smoke deaths from lung cancer and another 33,951 secondhand smoke deaths from heart disease.

Dr. Joshua Pearce, a professor in the MOST lab in Michigan, developed a metric in a recent study to determine when an industry warrants an industry-wide corporate death penalty. To set an ideal metric, Pearce used three assumptions:

1. everyone has the right to life;
2. everyone has the right to work;
3. human law should give corporations the right to exist if they benefit humanity.

“If we know that life trumps employment because you have to be alive to work, then for a company or industry to exist it must employ more people than it kills in a year,” Pearce said. “What this paper has done is set the minimum bar for industry existence.”

The tobacco industry employs 124,342 people based on data from the North American Industry Classification System, but is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Pearce says, “After running the numbers the results are shocking. Every tobacco industry job in the U.S. demands literally sacrificing about four American lives every year. ”

There is no COVID-19 industry and America is doing its best to protect as many American lives as possible. Yet the tobacco industry is responsible for more deaths than the White Houses’ most pessimistic predictions.

The results of the study appear to clearly warrant a tobacco industry-wide corporate death penalty in America.

Joshua Pearce
MOST
906-487-1466
email us here