This article from one of their incubatees describes their strategic approach:
Governments spend billions on healthcare and millions more subsidising policy campaigns to fight industries that thrive on harm, trying to protect us from tobacco, ultra-processed food, alcohol and fossil fuels to name a few. Yet year after year, these industries continue to expand, exploit, and interfere with regulation. They privatize profits while socializing costs. The result: fragile health systems, sick populations, and taxpayers footing the bill for preventable disease.
But here’s the thing: we already have the laws to stop them. What we lack is the will, and the funding, to enforce those laws through the courts.
That’s why we launched SHIFT, a catalyst funder for strategic litigation against health-harming corporations. Our aim is straightforward: enforce existing legislation, hold corporations accountable, and stop industries of harm from thriving. Litigation, after all, doesn’t persuade — it compels.
They appear to see the tobacco industry as an emblematic example of industries that are net harmful, and legal action as a specifically effective way to fight them:
We believe the fight begins with tobacco because it’s the model for every other harmful industry. It is the deadliest consumer product in history, killing more than 7 million people each year. It is also the most regulated, thanks to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the world’s only health-specific treaty.
That treaty, and the precedents already set in tobacco control, give us a unique opportunity. If we can enforce existing laws against tobacco companies, we can create a “halo effect” — precedents that ripple across industries, forcing others to meet higher standards of corporate accountability.
One of their other fellows authored a report for the European Respiratory Society that specifically advocates for and “endgame” strategy for eventual full prohibition via generational sales bans:
The power to introduce a generational sales ban, where it will never be legal to sell tobacco products to people born after a certain date, lies firmly within the competence of the Member States. There is no impediment, under EU law, to introducing such an endgame policy on the grounds of public health, given that it can be demonstrated to be both a proportionate and necessary measure to achieve a legitimate objective.
This article from one of their incubatees describes their strategic approach:
They appear to see the tobacco industry as an emblematic example of industries that are net harmful, and legal action as a specifically effective way to fight them:
One of their other fellows authored a report for the European Respiratory Society that specifically advocates for and “endgame” strategy for eventual full prohibition via generational sales bans: