Florida citizens must acknowledge that Governor Ron DeSantis is avoiding his responsibility to save the lives of the state’s residents. Based on his past actions during the COVID-19 pandemic, DeSantis has shown that advancing public health is not one of his political priorities. He is again working against protecting the public health of Floridians by banning the addition of fluoride to the drinking water.
Today’s new law outlawed adding fluoride to the public water drinking supply because it violated what DeSantis called “informed consent.” Still, it is really about advancing the far-right, anti-vaccine agenda and mounting an attack on all public institutions that support the public good.
Florida’s new anti-fluoride law sounds familiar because it is a resurrected version of a John Birch Society conspiracy theory from the 1940s. Fringe groups have opposed fluoridation since it started in the 1940s. During the 1950s and 1960s, conspiracy theorists said, without evidence, that fluoridation was “a communist plot to undermine American public health.” The John Birch Society then adopted this message, along with the Ku Klux Klan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Green Party of the United States. 
DeSantis and the Florida legislature now join these radical far-right fringe groups. The governor has also relied on the expertise of his controversial Florida surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo. The governor hired Ladapo because he has opposed the implementation of widely accepted medical treatments for measles, for instance, since DeSantis hired him, as well as the proven benefits of vaccinations and masking.
Today, DeSantis is aligned with Trump’s Health Secretary Robert Kennedy, who is another anti-vaxer and opposes many standard scientific treatments to prevent diseases.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which lasted from March 2020 to May 2023, DeSantis was a national leader who opposed mask wearing and mandatory vaccinations. As DeSantis raged that mask wearing was “an assault on personal liberties,” millions of Floridians adopted this ridiculous badge of courage and marched to the tune that Florida was a “free” state and that it was open for business.
DeSantis, who was considering a presidential run against Trump as a far-right candidate, boasted that “”We’re not shutting down, we’re gonna go forward, we’re gonna continue to protect the most vulnerable….particularly when you have a virus that disproportionately impacts one segment of society, to suppress a lot of working-age people at this point I don’t think would likely be very effective.”
DeSantis’ management of the epidemic was controversial, and the state produced fake reports, hidden statistics, opposed mandatory vaccinations, prevented local governments and private businesses from implementing preventative actions, and officially underreported COVID-19 cases.
DeSantis’ Fluoride Ban Will Produce Unnecessary Deaths
As an anti-woke presidential wannabe, DeSantis moved far to the right. In this VOX report, DeSantis, “A report from the Tampa Bay Times in April 2023 revealed that DeSantis’s state surgeon general had altered scientific data to justify his official position that young men should not receive the Covid-19 vaccine.
DeSantis, who has criticized former President Donald Trump for deferring to public health officials like Anthony Fauci, has embraced conspiratorial talking points. He has suggested profits and not public health drove the Covid vaccine campaign and convened a state grand jury to investigate any “misconduct” on the part of drug manufacturers and the scientific community related to the vaccines.
This helps explain why, since the start of the pandemic through November 2022, 324 in 100,000 Floridians died of COVID-19. As of December 2021, Florida had the eighth-highest per capita case rate among all US states. By May 2023, about 90,000 Floridians had died from COVID-19, according to USAFacts.org.
Doctors, dentists, and public health professionals overwhelmingly agree that fluoride prevents tooth decay and generally improves overall health. Infections resulting from bad teeth can inflame organs and arteries, reduce longevity, and reduce immunity since the mouth is an open source for bacteria to enter the body. Fluoride helps kill these invasive organisms.
The good news for Floridians is that DeSantis is uninformed, politically moved by right-wing conspiracy theories, and is consistently opposed to advancing the health of the state’s citizens.
DeSantis’ COVID-19 policies added to the 90,000 people killed in Florida, and he never looked back on his role in how he could have prevented some of those deaths with a more informed public health policy.
Instead, he boasted about the “freedoms” found in Florida. These freedoms are a significant reason Florida is the fraud capital of the United States, and why the state has a poor record of prosecuting frauds of all types—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, identity theft, insurance, and hurricane fraud against the elderly and average citizens. The state’s inability to prosecute white-collar criminal fraud is a significant reason why many billionaires are moving to Florida. They know they have a “get-out-of-jail-free card” if they can find the right judges and politicians.
This is why DeSantis’ claim that the anti-fluoride law is a form of “informed consent” is laughable, since most citizens never knew the law was even proposed. I bet that 80% of Floridians don’t even know what the law is about or what fluoride does. So, the premise that “informed consent” is at work here is just another Republican lie to push through a conspiracy-based policy that advances the far-right MAGA agenda.
