Florida’s false choices on fluoride in the water supply | Column

Last week’s Clearwater City Council meeting reminded me (again) that while the pandemic is over, the damage is not.

Council members heard a presentation Monday on the merits of fluoridating the drinking water supply. I call it a “presentation,” for lack of a better term, because it was brief, superficial and featured only three speakers — a supporter, a skeptic, and one against, including Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, who appeared as part of his continuing campaign to halt fluoridation in Florida.

Communities across the U.S. have added fluoride to their water since 1945, which dentists widely credit for reducing cavities and improving Americans’ overall health. The practice is recommended by nearly every public health, medical and dental organization, which is why the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has named fluoridation as one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century.

But the backlash against masks and vaccines during the pandemic has made some people view public health guidance as a conspiracy. That fury turned on fluoridation last year, after a new federal report and a California federal judge questioned the safety of fluoridated water. Ladapo said the developments presented Clearwater officials with a simple decision: Either believe these new studies are “junk science” or “you have to be comfortable with harming some people in your community.”

That, of course, is a false choice, yet it’s becoming the new tactic in scaring Floridians about fluoride.

First, you don’t have to declare the studies “junk science” to recognize how flawed they are in assessing fluoride safety in America. Anti-fluoride activists paint last year’s review of 74 studies on the association between higher fluoride and lower children’s IQ as determinative of the danger that communities face. But more than two-thirds of those studies were rated as low quality. All were conducted outside the U.S., and they examined fluoride levels at more than 1.5 milligrams per liter — twice the U.S. standard. As they say: Garbage in, garbage out. How can anyone say this is an honest, apples-to-apples comparison?

Second, neither the federal study nor the judge’s ruling (which is under appeal) declared that America’s recommended fluoridation levels were harming communities. Indeed, both the review and the judge were careful not to overstate their findings. The federal report found “insufficient data to determine” that current fluoride levels negatively affected children’s IQ,” concluding that “more research is needed.” And the judge’s ruling plainly conceded: “This finding does not conclude with certainty that fluoridated water is injurious to public health.” Medical and dental associations maintain their support for fluoride and described last year’s findings as a “fundamental” misunderstanding of science.

Yet this is how the debate continues to play out before city and county governments across Florida. Locally elected officials are content with accepting Ladapo’s advice at face value, wiping their hands from a decision that’s theirs to make. In the process, they are ignoring established science for alarmist theories, subverting facts to anecdotes and overselling the conclusions of even their favored research.

Clearwater may be the latest battleground, but the debate over fluoride continues statewide, as the Legislature considers a sweeping bill this session that would, among other things, bar communities from adding fluoride to their water. It’s a reckless move and knee-jerk approach that would harm the health of millions, and it would telegraph to the outside world that Florida doesn’t have serious people in charge.

The Republican Party has controlled Florida for decades and one theme it’s repeatedly hammered home is that the government cannot be trusted to run anything right — not the public schools, not social services, not mass transit, not even the town water plant. The paranoia surrounding COVID hasn’t eased, only redirected onto new targets, and now, in that same mindset, we’re poised to take fluoride away and sentence children to tooth decay. Sure, the pandemic is over, but the damage hasn’t quit.