No, Moderate Drinking Won’t Give You Cancer

That's the headline on Allysia Finley's column in Monday's Wall Street Journal. She skewers the "advisory" and its author, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy. To quote Ms. Finley:

"The report warns that, for some cancers, “evidence shows that this risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day.” Note the operative word, may. The link between heavy drinking and throat and mouth cancer is well-established—but not for moderate consumption.

"Two weeks earlier the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a congressionally mandated review of the recent evidence on the health effects of moderate drinking, or up to one drink a day for women and two for men. Its more than 200 pages of findings run counter to Dr. Murthy’s 22-page report, though they got scant attention in the press.

"The academies found insufficient evidence to support a link between moderate drinking and oral, pharyngeal, esophageal, laryngeal and other cancers. It did find a slightly higher risk of breast cancer with moderate drinking but also a lower risk of death generally and from cardiovascular disease specifically compared with never drinking.

"No matter. Dr. Murthy claims that “alcohol use,” not only abuse, is a “leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, contributing to nearly 100,000 cancer cases and about 20,000 cancer deaths each year.” This estimate is based on models of associations from cherry-picked observational studies. But even the report partially attributes only 17% of these estimated deaths to moderate drinking. Of the 609,820 cancer deaths in 2023, this would mean moderate drinking contributed to 3,400, or about 0.6%. Dr. Murthy’s claims about alcohol’s cancer risks are misleading but typical of his reports, which are intended to drive a political agenda."

None of the above are news to readers of this newsletter. She then goes on detail some of the other advisories in which he called for censorship, never mind the U.S. Constitution's protection of free speech, a host of progressive workplace wishes, increasing accress to public transit as an antidote for loneliness and isolation, increasing criminal liability for shooting a firearm after being attacked if you could have instead “safely retreated” and so on.

Comment: Finlay may be the only person in mainstream media who bothered to carefully read the Advisory itself and compare what it says with the most more carefully nuanced National Academies study. We think Finlay's column should be posted on every bev/al company's intranet and every employee should post it to all their social media accounts.