NBC’s Today smeared Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Monday, after he advised state municipal governments to stop adding fluoride to their drinking water. The segment painted Ladapo as a conspiracy kook for raising concerns about water fluoridation, while spending practically no time at all actually explaining what scientific basis he had for the move.
Background: Fluoride In Water
Fluoride offers proven benefits for dental health. This is basically undisputed. Countless studies have shown it prevents cavities, helps reduce the risk of gum disease, and generally strengthens teeth.
However, people don’t need to ingest fluoride in order to receive its dental benefits, and in fact multiple studies published on the National Institute of Health’s website (NIH.gov) indicate that fluoride ingestion poses developmental risks for children.
A 2019 study shared by the NIH found that “elevated fluoride intake during early development can result in IQ deficits that may be considerable.” A meta-study of papers published through October 2023, also found on the NIH’s website, “concluded there is moderate confidence in the scientific evidence that showed an association between higher levels of fluoride and lower IQ in children.”
Furthermore, the 2019 paper indicated that the currently-recommended fluoride content of water was likely well above the safe threshold for children: “Neurotoxicity appears to be dose dependent, and tentative benchmark dose calculations suggest that safe exposures are likely to be below currently accepted or recommended fluoride concentrations in drinking water.”
Everything above is research done in the course of a couple of hours, by somebody with no medical or scientific expertise. The purpose of providing that information is not to make some definitive case against water fluoridation in America, but rather to demonstrate that the people raising concerns about it are serious people. They’re not conspiracy theorists who were swayed by some anonymous blogger’s unhinged rantings, they’re scientists whose research is found on the NIH’s own website.
NBC Gets Political
Here’s the opening line of NBC News Daily anchor Kate Snow’s report: “Florida’s Surgeon General is going against mainstream public health agencies, echoing sentiments expressed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., citing research is preliminary and far from definitive.”
Snow continued: “Dr. Joseph Ladapo, citing controversial studies that claim that fluoride is linked to neuropsychiatric risk, particularly in pregnant women and children.” It’s unclear what about these studies is “controversial,” other than that Snow appears to personally dislike them.
That one sentence was the sum total of Ladapo’s evidence that Snow provided throughout the entire three-minute piece. The rest of the report was a series of arguments about fluoride’s proven benefits for dental hygiene — which, again, Ladapo has not disputed.
Then came the politics:
The American Dental Association saying that it unreservedly endorsed the fluoridation of community water supplies as safe, effective, and necessary in preventing tooth decay. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tapped by President-elect Trump to lead the Health and Human Services department, wrote on X: “The Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.”
You see, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. opposes water fluoridation, but Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. endorsed Donald Trump for president. According to the transitive property of media idiocy, this means that opposition to fluoride in water is a right-wing conspiracy theory.
It would no doubt be beneficial if some network aired a segment about the pros and cons of water fluoridation, including sound bites and data from experts on both sides of the argument. But this was not that segment. Rather, this was a bunch of uninformed news people turning a public health issue political, in order to score cheap points against a Trump cabinet appointee whom they dislike.
