The unqualified and unfit Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is putting in place his long-held quack theories, which will harm the health of Americans.

Echoing the warning of paranoid Gen. Jack D. Ripper, from “Dr. Strangelove,” who asked “Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?,” RFK plans to direct the CDC to stop recommending fluoridation of drinking water, which has been proven safe and effective in protecting teeth from decay.

Kennedy also announced that his department was undertaking a study to find the cause of the “autism epidemic,” which we imagine will point to culprits like fluoridation or the man’s main lifelong enemy, vaccines.

On fluoride, RFK’s contention in part is that it can be toxic, and that’s absolutely true, just as it’s true about every substance on Earth. If you have excess amounts of vitamins, of calcium, of iron, even of water, it will eventually be toxic to your body. We already know the levels at which fluoride is both acutely toxic and at which it can have detrimental cumulative impacts for children, and both of those levels are significantly above the recommended dose for municipal fluoride treatment.

As with most of his career as a conspiracist, RFK is tying together little kernels of truth into a false narrative and then framing it as just asking common-sense. It’s nothing new for him; in fact, this is his MO, to heavily insinuate a medical falsehood, then point to something real, like increased rates in diagnosis of autism, as a justification for advancing his quackery.

The trouble is that, after doing this for decades as a fringe outsider and an embarrassment to his family’s political legacy, he’s doing it now as the head of the nation’s public health infrastructure, empowering him to impose his crazy beliefs on the rest of us.

The most likely culprit for the increase in autism is better diagnostic and treatment tools for autism, which was long missed or misdiagnosed as mental retardation. If HHS wants a real, serious, long-term and longitudinal study of causes, then it should be able to do so in a sober, professional way. This seems more like RFK to reach a predetermined conclusion, one that is very unlikely to square with the available evidence. He wants a pretext to say “look, we studied this, and we’ve determined that the cause is vaccines” or fluoride or whatever other quackery he wants to legitimize.

Lest we forget what all this is about, fluoridation has been conclusively linked to better dental outcomes for children and adults, and this isn’t just about preventing the annoyance of cavities. Dental issues compound over time; cavities can become infections, abscesses, even life-threatening conditions if left to fester. And of course vaccines are an order of magnitude above in health need.

It’s a bizarre situation when the secretary of health and human services has to be forced to say through gritted teeth that measles vaccines are effective, and only because he was at the funeral of one of two children who have now died of a disease that was declared eradicated in the United States a quarter century ago. Even then, he can’t help but throw in the falsehood that the vaccine protection “wanes very quickly.” We’ll all pay the price for his delusions.

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