Make America healthy again? Sure, but Trump, Kennedy need to drop one silly idea | Opinion

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suggested that HIV does not cause AIDS (it does), and that COVID is an “ethnically targeted bio-weapon” designed to evade Jewish and Chinese people (it isn’t and doesn’t). Proving himself to be a principled, trustworthy man with unwavering convictions, Kennedy once compared President-elect Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, then renounced all that Nazi stuff weeks after Trump offered him a job on the campaign trail.

Kennedy apologized, via text message, to a babysitter who said he sexually assaulted her. And for reasons between him, his maker and Roseanne Barr, he dropped a dead bear cub in the middle of Central Park.

But our expected new Health and Human Service secretary is popular for reasons beyond Instagram feeding every person interested in “fitness tips” into the vast interlocking conspiracies he’s touted in one way or another. He voices serious concerns about American health even while proving himself every time he opens his mouth to be a wholly unserious person. We need to remember both when considering his policy pronouncements if the Senate confirms him to Trump’s Cabinet.

One of the first initiatives Kennedy may pursue is getting fluoride out of our water supply. “I think fluoride is on its way out,” he told MSNBC shortly after Trump won the election. “I’m not going to compel anyone to take [fluoride] out,” he claims, before explaining how he is going to compel local water systems to take it out.

“I’m going to advise the water districts about their legal liability, their legal obligation” to constituents, Kennedy said, citing studies showing lower IQ in children. Dental health company stocks surged, as investors anticipate Kennedy’s plans would put those products and services in high demand.

Leaving aside the highly subjective issues of using IQ to measure anything important, or the nonexistent evidentiary value of the fluoride studies Kennedy is probably alluding to, he stumbles into an actual problem while confusing it: namely, our dental health crisis.

One study from the Texas Health Institute showed Fort Worth had the lowest rate of federally qualified health centers (per 100,000 people) in the state.

Our country’s already expensive insurance system treats your teeth as a special kind of bone different from the rest in need of a separate monthly bill. This deserves a more specific fix, but the Trump administration’s persistent efforts to roll back the Affordable Care Act will make access to health care even more onerous and expensive than it already is, particularly for people who don’t have jobs that subsidize it and who don’t qualify for Medicaid.

But, at least most of our water districts still have fluoride, a cheap chemical that pays for itself by making it less likely we need to make that far too intimate, way too pricey date with the dental drill. Literally: the American Dental Association, trying to help you see your dentist less, wrote that “the cost of a lifetime of water fluoridation for one person is less than the cost of one filling,” making this intervention “the most cost-effective means of preventing tooth decay” in the United States.

The ADA based its findings on 70 years of evidence that fluoridated water systems raise the floor of our dental health outcomes.

The most measured complaint about American fluoride intake is that we already get fluoride in toothpaste. Good thing you can choose to pay for your fancy, fluorideless toothpaste if you want to reduce your personal intake.

But we’ve seen what happens when fluoride gets removed in other cities. In Juneau, Alaska, kids had more cavities and more bills. In Canada, one city that removed fluoride from its water supply in 2013 saw an almost immediate 51% boom in kids with tooth decay or needing urgent dental care. Even though those kids, by virtue of being Canadian, can get their teeth fixed without breaking their parents’ budgets, their city council put fluoride back in the water supply.

Kennedy touts plenty of causes, but we can’t let him subject our children’s teeth to his baseless anxieties. Dental visits are too expensive as is. Worrying about our water is exactly how we miss out on the real scam — the departing administration hasn’t fixed the problem and the administration Kennedy seeks to join will only make it worse.

Silly as he often is, letting him mess with what we do to our water is nothing to smile about.

This story was originally published November 26, 2024 at 5:27 AM.