We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

As one who has been known to pop a beer and hoist a glass of wine, I was concerned to see headlines about America’s Surgeon General saying that we should put warnings on alcohol products similar to those on cigarettes. Because moderate drinking is a “leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States.” That would be significant news, if true.

Happily, it isn’t. In the Wall Street Journal, Allysia Finley explains. First, the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, is a left-winger who has repeatedly abused his office to promote a progressive policy agenda that has nothing to do with public health. His most recent press release is one more instance in a long sequence; follow the link for details.

Second, Murthy is misrepresenting the evidence:

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.

Emphasis added. For millenia, people have known that heavy drinking is bad for you. That is not in question. But the data show that moderate drinkers, the category into which the vast majority of us fall, actually have a lower risk of death than teetotalers. Which causes me to wonder: is Dr. Murthy a teetotaler? Or is he like the Greenies who want to suppress the middle class by making air travel prohibitively expensive, while they themselves fly private airplanes?

Just a thought. The bottom line is, don’t be deceived by newspaper headlines based on pronouncements by left-wing bureaucrats who are pursuing a political agenda.