Well being Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. kicked off a tour via southwestern states on Monday by calling on states to ban fluoride in ingesting water provides, a transfer that might reverse what some medical specialists contemplate one of the vital public well being practices within the nation’s historical past.
The announcement got here at a information convention in Utah, the primary state to enact such a ban into legislation. The state’s new legislation is about to take impact in early Might, regardless of issues from public well being specialists who contemplate fluoridation of water core to stopping tooth decay.
“It is mindless to have it in our water provide,” Mr. Kennedy stated, echoing a position he took during the 2024 presidential campaign. “I’m very, very happy with this state for being the primary state to ban it, and I hope many extra will come.”
The Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, which Mr. Kennedy oversees as well being secretary, has listed fluoridation as one of many 10 nice public well being achievements of the twentieth century. After the information convention, Stefanie Spear, Mr. Kennedy’s principal deputy chief of employees, stated Mr. Kennedy would direct the C.D.C.’s group preventative companies job drive to review fluoride and make a brand new advice.
Mr. Kennedy appeared on the information convention alongside the administrator of the Environmental Safety Company, Lee Zeldin, who introduced that the E.P.A. would re-examine analysis on potential well being dangers of fluoride in water.
The present commonplace “was most lately reviewed July of 2024, however so much has occurred since July of 2024,” Mr. Zeldin stated. The evaluate of security knowledge “wouldn’t be taking place, if not for Secretary Kennedy,” he added.
The fluoridation debate stretches again to the Fifties, when conspiracy theories swirled round whether or not the observe was a Communist plot to trigger mind injury. Some research counsel that extra publicity to fluoride — at ranges twice the quantity really useful by the federal authorities — may hurt infants.
The American Dental Association has said that water fluoridation reduces dental decay by at the least 25 % in kids and adults.
The Make America Wholesome Once more tour, which is able to take Mr. Kennedy via elements of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, was meant to attract consideration to a few of the secretary’s common-ground pursuits, spotlighting initiatives that emphasize vitamin and life-style selections as instruments for combating illness. On the information convention, Mr. Kennedy additionally lauded Utah’s latest laws to ban ultra-processed meals at school meals and to limit individuals from utilizing federal meals help advantages to buy sweet and soda. He announced late final month that the Trump administration would start permitting states to bar members of the Supplemental Diet Help Program, or SNAP, from utilizing the cash to pay for soda.
Mr. Kennedy’s first cease on the tour was the Osher Heart for Integrative Well being on the College of Utah, which prides itself in taking a “whole-person” approach to affected person care, together with an emphasis on sleep, train and even group connection.
The Osher Heart, set towards the backdrop of the Wasatch Mountains, is provided with a “meals pharmacy” for continual illness sufferers and a “educating kitchen” to coach medical college students on vitamin.
With campus law enforcement officials stationed across the perimeter, Mr. Kennedy boarded the Wellness Bus, a 40-foot car that gives group well being screenings for blood strain, blood glucose and ldl cholesterol. He additionally climbed into the again of the cellular meals pharmacy, the place sufferers with continual well being circumstances deliver prescriptions for components like brown rice, zucchini, almond milk and canned pears.
Mr. Kennedy visited the middle’s check kitchen — a contemporary house with expansive home windows and indoor shrubbery — the place medical college students and dietitians led him via wholesome snack preparations.
In between Mr. Kennedy’s occasions on the campus, about two dozen protesters appeared alongside the driveway to the middle, chanting and waving posters with messages similar to “Little one Killer” and, in a nod to the Trump administration’s termination of quite a few medical analysis grants, “Analysis Saves Lives.”
Mr. Kennedy has confronted harsh criticism for his dealing with of the federal authorities’s response to a measles outbreak in West Texas, which has contaminated practically 500 individuals there and has unfold to different states.
On Sunday, Mr. Kennedy attended the funeral of an unvaccinated 8-year-old lady — the second confirmed fatality from measles in a decade in the USA — and met together with her household earlier than persevering with to Utah.
Throughout his first months in workplace, Mr. Kennedy’s insurance policies have been unfurled with nice brouhaha, however the secretary himself has stored a comparatively low profile, notably for an official together with his diploma of fame. The White Home has inspired Mr. Kennedy to take a extra public-facing strategy to his function, however the timing of his first main push out within the nation would require toeing a cautious line round probably the most conspicuous situation on the desk: vaccines.
Public well being specialists say the outbreak is pushed by low vaccination charges. Mr. Kennedy, who’s famously skeptical of vaccine security, shifted his rhetoric after the little lady’s funeral, posting on X: “The best option to stop the unfold of measles is the MMR vaccine.”
It was probably the most definitive assertion he has made endorsing vaccines as a preventive instrument, however some public well being specialists have been dismayed that he didn’t explicitly suggest that oldsters vaccinate their kids and didn’t say the vaccines have been protected. And several other hours later he posted on X again, praising two medical doctors who’re utilizing unproven therapies to look after tons of of youngsters with measles.
For months, Mr. Kennedy has emphasised that vaccination is a matter of parental selection and has inspired individuals to contemplate unproven regimens like vitamin A, which may lead to toxicity, and advised that poor lifestyle choices have been at play amongst victims.
Weight loss plan and vitamin “don’t supply any profit to forestall an infection with measles in anyway,” stated Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and immunologist who has studied measles.
Wholesome meals and train can “assist restrict the implications of many infections, together with measles, however won’t stop them,” he added. “Prevention is by far the very best drugs.”
