For more than half a century, the American people have been successfully propagandized to believe that it’s beneficial to infuse America’s public water systems with fluoride.
That spell was broken in September, and the era of municipal water fluoridation might be coming to a slow yet certain end.
Utah is set to completely ban fluoride from its public water systems. The Beehive state’s legislature has sent a bill for Republican Governor Spencer Cox to sign to achieve exactly this. There is hope among the anti-fluoride population that this will be the first of 50 dominoes to fall.
Utahns who worry this could lead to more dentist visits should fret not. The bill gives pharmacists new authority to prescribe fluoride supplement pills.
Representative Stephanie Gricius sponsored the fluoride bill. She told The Defender:
I am a firm believer that the proper role of government is to provide safe, clean drinking water, not medicate the public on a mass scale. Because I also believe in medical freedom, I wanted fluoride to remain available to anyone who wanted it for either themselves or their children — which is why we made the prescription easier to obtain through a pharmacy.
In September, California federal judge Edward Chen ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take action after siding with plaintiffs who alleged, based on multiple studies, that exposure to fluoride is linked to reduced IQ in children. Fluoride Action Network (FAN), Mothers Against Fluoridation, and other plaintiffs brought the lawsuit against the EPA, which is appealing the ruling.
Chen’s decision came on the heels of a then-recently published report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Toxicology Program (NTP). According to a summary of the findings:
The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children. The NTP review was designed to evaluate total fluoride exposure from all sources and was not designed to evaluate the health effects of fluoridated drinking water alone.
Critics of water fluoridation argue that even if the recommended dose poses no health risks, it’s nearly impossible to ensure people only ingest the recommended dose. Americans ingest fluoride from multiple sources, not just tap water. Fluoride is present in toothpaste, sodas, canned foods, and mouthwash. Murray Rothbard pointed out the absurdity of water fluoridation in an 1992 article titled “Fluoridation Revisited”:
It is starkly clear that one key to any medication is control of the dose: Different people, at different stages of risk, need individual dosages tailored to their needs. And yet with water compulsorily fluoridated, the dose applies to everyone, and is necessarily proportionate to the amount of water one drinks. What is the medical justification for a guy who drinks ten glasses of water a day receiving ten times the fluoride dose of a guy who drinks only one glass? The whole process is monstrous as well as idiotic.
Indeed, fluoridated water has caused mass sickness. If anyone knows this, it’s the people of Utah. In the city of Sandy, a malfunctioning pump in the water fluoridation system released more than 40 times the recommended level of fluoride into the water in 2019. It affected 1,500 households, institutions, and businesses, and sickened more than 200 people. An investigation showed that officials waited 10 days to tell the public what happened.
Today, more than 150 U.S. towns or counties have voted to keep fluoride out of public water systems since 2010, according to the Fluoride Action Network.
Like most mainstream groups — including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Dental Association, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — Lorna Koci, who chairs the Utah Oral Health Coalition, believes fluoridation is the best way to prevent tooth decay on a large scale. She also believes the anti-fluoride momentum has something to do with the new director of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“I think the anti-fluoride people, they’re latching onto Kennedy’s opportunity with his beliefs and using that now as a way to kind of get in the door to stop water fluoridation,” Koci told the Associated Press.
Kennedy has not been shy about trusting the science on fluoride. He believes it is indeed lowering IQ in children, just as the studies show. He told an MSNBC reporter back in November:
I think fluoride is on the way out because of that court decision. I think the faster it goes out, the better. I’m not going to compel anybody to take it out. But I am going to advise the water districts about their legal liability, their legal obligations, their service to their constituents, and I’m going to give them good information on the science and fluoride will disappear.
As of 2020, 72.7 percent of municipal water systems in the United States included fluoride. By contrast, most of Western Europe and Japan do not fluoridate their water.
How did we get here? Rothbard explains:
Fluorides are byproducts of many industrial processes, being emitted in the air and water, and probably the major source of this byproduct is the aluminum industry. By the 1920s and 1930s, fluoride was increasingly being subjected to lawsuits and regulations.… The time had come for damage control, or even to reverse the public image of this menacing substance. The Public Health Service, remember, was under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department, and the Treasury Secretary during the 1920s and until 1931 was none other than billionaire Andrew J. Mellon, head of the powerful Mellon interests, and founder and virtual ruler of the Aluminum Corporation of America (ALCOA), the dominant firm in the aluminum industry….
The Mellon Institute, ALCOA’s research lab in Pittsburgh, sponsored a study in which biochemist Gerald J. Cox fluoridated some lab rats, decided that cavities in those rats had been reduced, and immediately concluded that “the case [that fluoride reduces cavities] should be regarded as proved.”
The following year, 1939, Cox, the ALCOA scientist working for a company beset by fluoride damage claims, made the first public proposal for mandatory fluoridation of water. Cox proceeded to stump the country urging fluoridation.
During World War II, damage claims for fluoride emissions piled up as expected, in proportion to the great expansion of aluminum production during the war. But attention from these claims was diverted when, just before the end of the war, the PHS began to push hard for compulsory fluoridation of water. Thus the drive for compulsory fluoridation of water accomplished two goals in one shot: It transformed the image of fluoride from a curse to a blessing that will strengthen every kid’s teeth, and it provided a steady and substantial monetary demand for fluorides to dump annually into the nation’s water.
The fluoride debate remained intense throughout the entire mid-20th century. TNA’s predecessor, American Opinion, featured experts who never wavered, even as fluoridation continued to infect more public water systems. In addition to arguments dispelling the erroneous medical points, the magazine focused on an even more important theme.
“[Fluoridation] is socialized medicine in an area of health where the allegedly preventive fluorides are readily available in tablet form,” American Opinion said in its September 1958 issue.
TNA and its parent company, The John Birch Society, consistently maintained that government had no business imposing mass medication onto citizens, no matter how benevolent bureaucrats believed they were behaving.
Many decades after its successful fluoride campaign, the government once again bared its tyrannical teeth. After the hasty rollout of the Covid-19 “vaccine,” the Joe Biden administration did everything it could to force people to take the shot. It forced all federal employees to choose between the jab or a job. The government extended that mandate to employees of contractors. Some cities such as New York City and Los Angeles made the injections mandatory for anyone who wanted to participate in society. Anyone who wanted to eat out or watch a ball game had to prove their vaccination status. This was textbook tyranny.
Perhaps if Americans expressed outrage at mass fluoridation, they wouldn’t have ended up with a government that tried to jab them with a new, unproven technology.