STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President-elect Trump said a lot while campaigning, and in the days ahead, we learn what his administration will do. In the campaign's final days, Trump said he would let Robert F. Kennedy Jr., quote, "go wild" on health. The one-time independent-presidential-candidate-turned-Trump-supporter and vaccine skeptic said on January 20, the new administration would recommend against fluoride in drinking water. So yesterday after the election, we got Kennedy on the line on NPR.
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INSKEEP: Is this something that you and - something that the administration is definitely going to do, recommend against fluoride?
ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: Yes. That's something that the administration will do.
INSKEEP: Yes, he says. There is a lot to discuss here, so we have brought back NPR's Pien Huang. Good morning.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK, so Kennedy gave his reasons. He claimed that fluoride affects neurological development and lowers IQ in children in addition to being good for your teeth, which is why it's in the drinking water. What does the science say about this?
HUANG: Yeah, so Steve, as you mentioned, fluoride has been added to public water systems for a long time, since the 1940s, and the main reason is that it prevents cavities. Now, for all of those decades, it's had its detractors, too. It's long been known to stain teeth and damage enamel at high levels, and more recently, some studies have linked high levels of fluoride with lower IQ. That's at levels of fluoride that are twice what's recommended for drinking water.
INSKEEP: Ah.
HUANG: And it's not clear that there's any risk to lower fluoride levels, which have clearly been useful in preventing cavities. So there is a scientific discussion around IQ and high levels of fluoride that's happening. But Kennedy also said that fluoride in drinking water causes arthritis, cancer, other diseases. And those claims are just not part of the open debate right now.
INSKEEP: OK, so there's a real discussion and also overblown claims. That is helpful. And you also said that it would take a lot more fluoride to harm you than is in the drinking water. Now, there's another topic that we discussed in yesterday's interview. RFK and I talked about vaccines.
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INSKEEP: How quickly will you act on federal support for vaccines or research on vaccines?
KENNEDY: I will work immediately on that. That will be one of my priorities, to make sure that Americans - of course, we're not going to take vaccines away from anybody. We are going to make sure that Americans have good information. Right now the science on vaccine safety particularly has huge deficits in it, and we're going to make sure those scientific studies are done and that people can make informed choices about their vaccinations and their children's vaccinations.
INSKEEP: OK, so he just wants to get information out there, which sounds fine, but his viewpoint on this is the information shows that vaccines generally are unsafe. What do we make of that?
HUANG: Yeah, exactly. As you're saying, what he's doing here is, on the one hand, saying that they - you know, we just want more information. On the other hand, he's challenging the safety of vaccines, which has long been established relative to the risks that they protect against. You know, Kennedy is a known vaccine skeptic. He's called COVID vaccines a crime against humanity, pushed claims that vaccines cause autism over and over. That is not true. It is disproven. Josh Sharfstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University, says Kennedy has been sowing doubt in public health for years.
JOSH SHARFSTEIN: He's basically saying, here's my view; here's some thoughts, and you can't trust what people who - you know, their whole career, their whole goal is to support health, and they have all this expertise - you can't trust them at all.
HUANG: I'll say that Kennedy is an environmental lawyer, and Sharfstein says that this disregard for public health process, undermining trust, that could harm people, and that's what concerns him the most.
INSKEEP: NPR's Pien Huang, thanks for the context - really appreciate it.
HUANG: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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