Trump May End Water Fluoridation On Day One, Will Consider Banning Vaccines
Make Tooth Decay/Measles Great Again?
This Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a proclamation that, if Donald Trump is elected, he will — on day one — end the fluoridation of drinking water (largely considered, except by kooks, to be one of the most important public health initiatives of the last century).
“On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water,” he wrote on social media, adding “Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”
This would be the day after Trump said that Kennedy can do anything he wants and a few days after he announced that he was going to let him “go wild” on health matters.
On Sunday, when asked about this by NBC’s Dasha Burns, Trump said he was fine with that.
“Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump told Burns. “You know, it’s possible.”
Water fluoridation has long been a bugaboo for conspiracy theorists of all types. It was a particular obsession of the John Birch Society, which believed it was a communist plot (of course) to control our minds and, perhaps worse, make us more amenable to the idea of socialized healthcare. After all, if people start thinking that poor children deserve to have strong teeth even if their parents can’t afford to take them to the dentist, what is to stop them from thinking those children shouldn’t die because their parents can’t afford their healthcare? Or that people shouldn’t die because they can’t afford healthcare? Quelle horreur!
To be clear, there is already fluoride in water anyway. That occurs naturally. All that water fluoridation does is increase the levels of fluoride ions to a level that is safe and most effective for preventing tooth decay (0.7 milligrams of fluoride per liter).
RFK Jr’s biggest claim here, and the one people tend to find most convincing, is that “studies” show that water fluoridation leads to children having “lower IQs.” (When anti-fluoride kooks really want to drill this in, they’ll refer to them as the Harvard Studies, to insinuate that these studies were done at Harvard, which they were not.)
Is this true? To an extent, but not to one that says what they think it says.
In 2011, Philippe Grandjean and Anna Choi, who were members of the faculty of Harvard School of Public Health, dug up a whole bunch of very obscure, mostly Chinese studies about the effects of fluoride that supposedly showed a link between lower IQs and fluoride — ultimately eliminating all but 27 of them. The problem? These studies were on fluoride poisoning, not the relatively miniscule levels of fluoride in our drinking water. The dose, as they say, makes the poison — and many nutrients that we require for basic life functions can also be poisonous to us in excessive doses. For instance, we all need iron to live, right? Some of us even need to take extra iron or at least be sure to eat a lot of iron-rich foods, because we get anemic. But too much iron could literally kill you or at least kill your liver. You can overdose on Vitamin A or Vitamin D or even water. Or oxygen! Oxygen toxicity is a thing.
One year later, Grandjean and Choi released a statement making it very, very clear that the studies they looked at were A) quite flawed, and B) had jack shit to do with the levels of fluoride we have in the US.
“Our study summarized the findings of 27 studies on intelligence tests in fluoride-exposed children,” they wrote, “25 of the studies were carried out in China. On average, children with higher fluoride exposure showed poorer performance on IQ tests. Fluoride released into the groundwater in China in some cases greatly exceeded levels that are typical in the U.S.”
“These results,” they added, “do not allow us to make any judgment regarding possible levels of risk at levels of exposure typical for water fluoridation in the U.S.”
In other words, no one is trying to poison our precious bodily fluids (well, except for the oil companies doing fracking, but that’s a whole other issue).
Sadly, this is just one of the many fucked up things that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hopes to do with our public health systems. He also wants to ban vaccines, and in the same interview where Trump said he would be fine with taking fluoride out of the drinking water, he also said he’d consider banning vaccines.
“Well, I’m going to talk to [Kennedy] and talk to other people, and I’ll make a decision, but he’s a very talented guy and has strong views,” Trump said.
Yes, because what would be really great, in a country without universal healthcare, would be mass outbreaks of contagious viruses. That is just what we need.
Wondering what other nonsense RFK Jr has planned for us? Take a look at this video he posted last month in which he has the gall to suggest that the fact that we have a lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality rate and higher maternal mortality rate than other developed countries is because we eat Cheez-Its sometimes and not because, you know, they have universal healthcare and we do not.
I’m going to need to point out here that tartrazine, or Yellow #5, has been extensively studied and deemed safe by the FDA. It’s also in food products in Europe (albeit sometimes with a label suggesting that some “studies” suggest it may cause attention issues in children, though there is not actually a lot of concrete evidence for this), which really negates his whole “this is why we have lower life expectancies than people in Europe!” thing.
Of all the godawful stupid, damaging things that Donald Trump will do if he becomes president, RFK Jr’.s health conspiracy shit may top the list.
There's that gag in Futurama were the Brain Slug Party's political platform is to give everyone brain slugs. I sort of feel that brainworm controlling the Kennedy lunatic has something similar planned, and the only thing stopping them is an aversion to fluoride.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ5iEn3m7Vc
Yeah, I'm going to take diet and health advice from a dude who looks like an old leather bicycle saddle that was left out in the rain.