As part of the World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) campaign, WCO in partnership with the Cancer Patients Aid Association (CPAA) organized an online musical concert involving Bollywood celebrities and singers on 7 June, with youth as the primary target audience. In the past, WCO has worked with CPAA for health promotion by organizing on-ground events where film and television actors, singers and many other celebrities have pledged support to the cause. In the COVID-19 context, it was not possible to do an on the ground event, and yet the issues related to harms from tobacco use is more relevant than ever, because COVID-19 attacks the lung and tobacco use makes it vulnerable. To continue efforts to educate the public about harms of tobacco use, the online musical concert was conceptualized.
On 7 June, a concert focused on the WNTD 2020 theme of creating a ‘Tobacco-free generation’ and highlighting that the ‘tobacco and COVID-19 relationship’ smoking weakens the immunity and makes people more vulnerable to COVID-19, was streamed. Awareness was also raised about the fact that spitting by smokeless tobacco users facilitates the spread of infectious diseases like COVID 2019. Messages were shared by experts, youth influencers and well-known celebrities from Indian film/music industry — Shaan, Salim-Sulaiman, Kunal Ganjawala, Neha Bhasin, Bhoomi Trivedi, Vishal Dadlani, Mamta Sharma, Jonita Gandhi, Shilpa Rao, Vivek Oberoi, Neetu Chandra and others. The online musical campaign was conceived as an innovative way of disseminating health promotion messages during COVID-19 while following the extant physical distancing norms. All the celebrities and artists contributed pro bono for these campaigns, shot their videos from home with minimum equipment and technical support. If you missed the concert before, you can still watch it on YouTube, where it has been uploaded now.