RFK Jr. Kicks Off 'Make America Toothless Again' Campaign, Thrilling Fifth Dentists Everywhere
Four out of five dentists still believe this is a very bad idea.
Last week, Utah became the first state to officially ban adding fluoride to the drinking water, for reasons no one could possibly explain without sounding very, very, very stupid and paranoid. Governor Spencer Cox, even in signing the bill into law, failed to share exactly what it was he thought that fluoride did besides reduce tooth decay by 25 percent.
“You would think you would see drastically different outcomes with half the state not getting it and half the state getting it. I’ve talked to a lot of dentists. We haven’t seen that,” Cox said of signing the bill. “So it’s got to be a really high bar for me if we’re going to require people to be medicated by their government.”
“I’m very, very proud of this state for being the first state to ban it, and I hope many more will,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, praising the state for being “the leader in making America healthy again.”
And so ended the global tyranny of weirdly perfect Mormon teeth.
In a press conference on Monday, Kennedy Jr. announced that he will be officially directing the CDC to stop recommending that communities fluoridate their water based on his non-scientific beliefs about it. Previously, the CDC listed water fluoridation as one of their top 10 scientific advancements of the 20th century. Of course, that list also included vaccination, “control of infectious diseases,” family planning, safe workplaces, motor-vehicle safety and other things conservatives have opposed in various ways.
The Associated Press reports that he is assembling a team of “health experts” — which we can only assume will include YouTubers who claim to have cured themselves of cancer and/or having brown eyes through juicing, and several Midwest moms featured in “Doctors hate her!” clickbait ads — to “study the issue and make new recommendations.”
It does seem worth noting at this juncture that pretty much all of the things that Kennedy Jr. wants to “study” are things that have been widely used for decades, and which we have an overwhelming amount of evidence are safe and effective.
Fluoride has long been a thing that delusional, paranoid people rant about on street corners and John Birch Society meetings as being part of a communist plot to harm American health or to “reduce an individual's power to resist domination by slowly poisoning and narcotising a certain area of the brain” in order to “make him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him.”
In recent years, anti-fluoride weirdos have tried to claim instead that it has adverse effects on health, with freaks like RFK Jr. claiming that it is “an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.” He must have gotten that intel from his brain worms, as there is not one piece of evidence anywhere that the level of fluoride in United States water systems does any of that.
In fact, because of this complete lack of evidence, most of the framing around fluoridation nonsense has been about “medical freedom” — as with Gov. Cox’s assertion that it requires “people to be medicated by their government.”
It is, of course, possible to get sick from fluoride, as it is possible to get sick from literally any substance on earth. However, if one were to drink the amount of fluoridated water that could cause any fluoride-related harm, they would first die of water intoxication.
Joining Kennedy Jr. at that press conference was newly minted Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin, who is also planning to organize “scientific studies” to assess the safety of fluoride that will be ignored unless they can be manipulated to suggest that it is, in fact, harmful.
“When this evaluation is completed, we will have an updated foundational scientific evaluation that will inform the agency’s future steps,” Zeldin said. “Secretary Kennedy has long been at the forefront of this issue. His advocacy was instrumental in our decision to review fluoride exposure risks, and we are committed to working alongside him, utilizing sound science as we advance our mission of protecting human health and the environment.”
Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the first city in the world to fluoridate their water in 1945, so we actually have 80 years of evidence showing that fluoride is safe — not to mention the many, many scientific studies backing that up. The only studies that did show it had any ill effects used water with a far higher concentration of fluoride than exists in US water systems.
So far, the only people who seem to have lost any IQ points as a result of water fluoridation are people like RFK Jr., Lee Zeldin and others who oppose it.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
You're a Kennedy.
You know it's not fluoride that makes water dangerous.
I love this.
Dr. Bucky Isotope, PhD, BOFA
@buckyisotope.bsky.social
EVERY SCIENTIST IN THE WORLD: vaccines are the safest and best way to prevent disease
RFK JR: I recommend rubbing dog poop in your eyes while doing the Macarena