The CDC found tobacco kills more than 480,000 Americans/year while COVID-19 killed less than 350,000 Americans in 2020. Should the tobacco industry still exist?

ATLANTA, GA, USA, January 4, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ -- In the worst pandemic in more than a century, COVID-19 killed less than 350,000 Americans. Quietly, the tobacco industry killed more Americans in the same year. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 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. The COVID-19 deaths than the CDC they found only 303,823. We have made major disruptions to the economy to battle COVID-19 and many are asking if the tobacco industry should be allowed to exist.

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 find the theoretical bare minimum for an 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 COVID-19 in 2020 by a wide margin.

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

Joshua Pearce
MOST
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