Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks throughout a marketing campaign rally for Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump at Macomb Neighborhood Faculty on November 01, 2024 in Warren, Michigan. Kennedy has known as for an finish to fluoride within the water provide, a observe that saves billions annually in dental care.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Photographs/Getty Photographs North America
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Photographs/Getty Photographs North America
It’s been thought-about one of many biggest public well being achievements of the twentieth century: by placing a small quantity of fluoride within the water provide, public well being officers have prevented tens of millions of cavities, saved tens of billions of {dollars} in dental prices, and made youngsters more healthy.
However in a publish on X on Saturday, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated one in all his first acts as an official in a brand new Trump administration can be to “advise all U.S. water techniques to take away fluoride from public water.” He went on to record a number of false statements concerning the results of fluoride after which linked to a video on an internet site based by distinguished anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist Del Bigtree.
Former President Donald Trump appeared receptive to the thought of nixing fluoride from the water provide. “Nicely, I haven’t talked to him about it but, however it sounds OK to me,” Trump stated Sunday in a phone interview with NBC. “You realize, it’s potential.”
Consultants have been swift to sentence the promise to take away fluoride from the water. “Fluoride has been properly examined. It clearly and definitively decreases cavities, and isn’t related to any clear proof of the power ailments talked about in that tweet,” says Dr. Paul Offit, a researcher and doctor at Kids’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a science denialist. He makes up his personal scientific truths and ignores the precise truths,” Offit says.
Fluoride has clear advantages
The science is unambiguous – including fluoride to the water provide has been efficient in reducing the variety of cavities in each youngsters and adults. Fluoride works to revive minerals to enamel which can be misplaced when micro organism develop quickly contained in the mouth, significantly after consuming sugary snacks.
Greater than a dozen latest research from governments and tutorial establishments around the globe have discovered that fluoride reduces tooth decay in youngsters and adults by round 25%, in response to the American Dental Affiliation. It’s significantly helpful for these in lower-income households who could not have entry to fluoride merchandise, reminiscent of toothpastes and mouth rinses. A examine by the Colorado Faculty of Public Well being discovered that including fluoride to the water saved roughly $6.8 billion {dollars} in dental bills in a single 12 months alone.
In recent times, some research have instructed that top ranges of fluoride would possibly trigger decrease IQ in youngsters. A latest authorities evaluation discovered reasonable proof for the impact, however not on the ranges at present utilized in U.S. ingesting water. The ADA says that the advantages of fluoridation proceed to outweigh any potential dangers.
The unique public well being conspiracy principle
Regardless of the clear advantages, conspiracy theories round fluoride have existed for nearly so long as the water has been fluorinated, in response to Matthew Dallek, a political historian on the George Washington College.
“In a method the conspiracy principle about fluoride within the ingesting water is among the unique public well being conspiracy theories,” he says.
Fluoride was first launched in 1945 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which additionally occurs to be the Trump marketing campaign’s final rally web site earlier than election day.
Placing fluoride in water rapidly unfold across the nation as soon as the advantages have been clear in Grand Rapids.
However proper from the beginning, wild theories concerning the chemical have been circulating. “It served as an virtually good conspiracy principle,” he explains. Fluoride was unseen, mandated by the federal government, and current in faucet water, a substance that just about everybody was ingesting.
Dallek says that the theories have been significantly pushed within the Nineteen Sixties by the John Birch Society, a far proper group that alleged communists had infiltrated a lot of the federal government. The group believed that “any step in direction of authorities interventions was primarily a step on the highway to communist intervention,” he says. Because of this, they “latched on to fluoride as a part of a communist plot.”
The claims round fluoride have been diffuse, however included the concepts that it might by some means be used for thoughts management, or that it was a chemical weapon designed to poison individuals. Initially, a minimum of, the concepts appeared to seek out some traction with the general public.
“There have been actions that sprouted up everywhere in the nation to cease fluoridation within the ingesting water,” Dallek says.
In 1966, Honolulu’s authorities vetoed a measure to incorporate fluoride within the water. Fluoride nonetheless isn’t utilized in Hawaii and a 2015 report discovered that the state had the very best price of tooth-decay amongst youngsters within the nation, and it continues to have among the worst oral well being of any state.
Mocked in films
However the motion by no means caught on extra broadly. The fluoride conspiracies have been brazenly mocked in films reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” wherein Basic Jack Ripper begins a nuclear conflict partly over a perception that fluoride was a communist plot. By the Eighties, the problem largely died away. “Sometimes there have been anti-fluoride campaigns that may pop up across the nation,” Dallek says.
However within the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, fluoride conspiracy theories have resurfaced, usually pushed by people reminiscent of Kennedy who additionally consider that childhood vaccines trigger autism and different ailments. At the moment, anti-vaccine advocates push the harms of fluoride together with these of vaccines and chemtrails, supposed trails of chemical substances left by industrial airliners to hurt individuals and the setting.
Kennedy on Monday posted a video urging his supporters to vote for Trump so he’s elected with a robust mandate. “Then, nobody will be capable to cease us when he empowers me to wash up corruption within the federal businesses, and particularly our well being businesses,” he stated.
However Offit says that Kennedy’s potential function in main the nation’s public well being might show disastrous, significantly for younger individuals who profit from each fluoride and vaccines. “It’s solely the youngsters who will endure his ignorance,” Offit says.
