Siegel on Altria/RJR:
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In these comments, Altria supports policy changes that are not in its best financial interests in the sense that the current burdensome regulations are in Altria's favor and without changes to make them less burdensome, these regulations would essentially hand the entire vaping market to Altria and Reynolds American. Virtually no other companies have the financial resources to develop the required PMTAs. So Altria could easily just sit by quietly and then enjoy an oligopoly in the vaping market.
There's another possible explanation:
The way the Deeming was proposed in 2014, if someone filed a PMTA, they could keep selling the product in question indefinitely unless/until the FDA rejected it. This would indeed have given BT an oligopoly in the vaping market, because the FDA would have had to show at least some credible reason to reject the PMTAs that were submitted by BT.
But in the final version of the Deeming, that's not how things work. In the final version that's now codified as administrative law, if the FDA doesn't approve a PMTA within one year of the filing deadline, a manufacturer must cease selling the product in question. This allows the FDA to "pocket veto" any and all PMTAs without ever showing cause why.
Some here (including one of the site's administrators) believe that the FDA does not intend to approve any PMTAs for vapor products at all. I'm not sure I buy this, but if that's what BT also believes, then it certainly would be in their financial interest to get behind a change in the grandfather date, no? After all, they've invested hundreds of millions into the development, marketing, and merchandising of their vapor products.