As Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services director pick, Robert F Kennedy Jr has vowed to ban flouride from drinking water.
But, it has emerged that, the Kennedy dynasty heir actually used to hawk bottles of drinking water with a higher concentration of fluoride than most tap water in the US.
In 1999, RFK Jr co-founded Keeper Springs bottled water in a bid to support his environmental organization the Waterkeeper Alliance, a network of groups dedicated to cleaning up polluted waterways.
Keeper Springs hit supermarket shelves alongside the likes of Evian brandishing a red, white, and blue label on its 50 percent recycled PET bottles.
“Bottled water doesn’t get purer than that,’’ one ad campaign in 1999 cited byThe New York Times read.
“To 532 endangered species, it’s holy water,” another boasted.
But, as it turned out, those bottles contained above average levels of the mineral fluoride.
According to a 2009 chemical analysis, first reported by The New Yorker, each bottle of RFK Jr’s water contained up to 1.3 milligrams of fluoride per litre.
That’s almost double the 0.7 milligrams per litre recommended by the HHS, which he is now tapped to lead.
Michael Campana, who was a professor of hydrogeology and water resources management at Oregon State University, later wrote a blog in 2012 slamming RFK Jr’s product for its use of plastic bottles, the cost of the item, transportation costs and greenhouse gas emissions.
He compared RFK Jr’s funding method of Waterkeeper Alliance using Keeper Springs with “a church running a brothel to make money to support its mission.”
By 2013, the company had ceased trading.
Co-founder Chris Bartle, RFK Jr’s college roommate, later told The New Yorker that the pair “lost money” despite their “heroic effort.”
Fast forward two decades and RFK Jr is now calling for a ban on fluoride in drinking water.
Low levels of flouride in drinking water is a safe way to prevent tooth decay, according to the CDC. It has even been touted as one of the 10 greatest public health achievements in the 20th century.
But, now that RFK Jr is set to oversee the CDC as health secretary, its future use appears to be in doubt.
In February, the-then third party candidate, said that he would “order the CDC to take every step necessary to remove neurotoxic fluoride from American drinking water” if elected president.
On November 2, after he dropped out of the running and endorsed Trump, he posted that “fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”
He added: “On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.”
The president-elect told NBC News that RFK Jr’s plans to remove fluoride from America’s drinking water “sounds OK to me”. He then tapped him to become his health secretary.
The Independent has contacted the Trump Transition team for comment.
