Florida Town Votes to Remove Fluoride from Water, Citing Trump’s Appointment of RFK Jr as ‘H-Something-Something Director’
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File
The city commission in Winter Haven, Florida voted this week to stop adding fluoride to the drinking water, citing President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the Secretary of “H-something-something” as one of the reasons.
On Thursday, the former-and-future president announced his intention to nominate Kennedy as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a controversial decision due to Kennedy’s long history of promoting conspiracy theories and misinformation about vaccines and other health topics, including water fluoridation.
According to a report by local NBC affiliate WFLA, the Winter Haven commissioners “voted 3-2 to remove the fluoride by January 1, or on a date ‘as soon as reasonably practical thereafter,'” at a commission meeting that included “a lengthy public comment period where residents shared health concerns.”
“For many commission members and audience members, the issue at hand was government overreach,” WFLA reported.
Commissioner Brad Dantzler, who was one of the three votes to remove the fluoride, “cited concerns posed by 2024 Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” — something that was mentioned by “[m]ultiple residents” during the public comment period. At the time of the commission meeting, Trump had not yet publicly announced his nomination of Kennedy.
The WFLA report offered additional details about Dantzler’s comments at the commission meeting:
“I’ll tell you that after the recent election, President Trump has named Mr. Kennedy to be his H-something-something director, and Mr. Kennedy has made it well known and has publicly said that he wants fluoride out of the water around the entire country,” Dantzler said. “So this issue, we may be at the front of it, but this issue is coming just based upon current events and what’s going on in Washington D.C.”
As pointed out by Dantzler and some public commenters, the discussion echoed those during meetings in the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This is reminiscent of what happened with COVID,” Dantzler said. “All four of us, with exception of Commissioner Dollison, were here during COVID and asked to make medical decisions on things that were very complicated, and we don’t completely understand.”
