No extra fluoride within the water? RFK Jr. needs that and Trump says it 'sounds OK'

It’s been thought of one of many best 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 thousands and thousands of cavities, saved tens of billions of {dollars} in dental prices, and made youngsters more healthy.

However in a post on X on Saturday, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mentioned one in all his first acts as an official in a brand new Trump administration could be to “advise all U.S. water programs 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 a web site based by outstanding anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist Del Bigtree.

Former President Donald Trump appeared receptive to the concept of nixing fluoride from the water provide. “Nicely, I haven’t talked to him about it but, however it sounds OK to me,” Trump mentioned Sunday in a telephone interview with NBC. “You recognize, it’s attainable.”

Consultants had 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 continual illnesses 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 tooth which might 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 world wide have discovered that fluoride reduces tooth decay in youngsters and adults by round 25%, in response to the American Dental Association. It’s significantly helpful for these in lower-income households who could not have entry to fluoride merchandise, equivalent to toothpastes and mouth rinses. A study by the Colorado College of Public Well being discovered that including fluoride to the water saved roughly $6.8 billion {dollars} in dental bills in a single yr alone.

In recent times, some research have prompt that prime ranges of fluoride may trigger decrease IQ in youngsters. A latest government review discovered average proof for the impact, however not on the ranges at present utilized in U.S. consuming water. The ADA says that the advantages of fluoridation proceed to outweigh any attainable dangers.

The unique public well being conspiracy idea

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 means the conspiracy idea about fluoride within the consuming water is likely one of 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 website earlier than election day.

Placing fluoride in water shortly unfold across the nation as soon as the advantages had been clear in Grand Rapids.

However proper from the beginning, wild theories concerning the chemical had been circulating. “It served as an nearly excellent conspiracy idea,” 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 had 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 basically 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 had been diffuse, however included the concepts that it might one way or the other be used for thoughts management, or that it was a chemical weapon designed to poison individuals. Initially, at the very least, the concepts appeared to search out some traction with the general public.

“There have been actions that sprouted up everywhere in the nation to cease fluoridation within the consuming 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 fee of tooth-decay amongst youngsters within the nation, and it continues to have a number of the worst oral well being of any state.

Mocked in films

However the motion by no means caught on extra broadly. The fluoride conspiracies had been brazenly mocked in films equivalent to Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” during which Common Jack Ripper begins a nuclear struggle partially over a perception that fluoride was a communist plot. By the Nineteen Eighties, the difficulty largely died away. “Sometimes there have been anti-fluoride campaigns that will 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 equivalent to Kennedy who additionally imagine that childhood vaccines trigger autism and different illnesses. In the present day, anti-vaccine advocates push the harms of fluoride together with these of vaccines and chemtrails, supposed trails of chemical substances left by business airliners to hurt individuals and the surroundings.

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 of cease us when he empowers me to scrub up corruption within the federal companies, and particularly our well being companies,” he mentioned.

However Offit says that Kennedy’s potential position 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.