The GOP’s befuddling closing message on health
I did not have 'get fluoride out of Americans' water' on my bingo card.
How does a beat reporter spend his last few days before Election Day?
If you’d asked me months ago, I would’ve probably predicted something like … writing about Democrats’ efforts to call attention to their drug-price changes, and whether their ad campaign had worked.
Or maybe … whether Republicans had successfully threaded the needle on their abortion messages, after two years of defeats.
I did not expect to spend my Saturday night writing about fluoride — until Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted that getting it out of our drinking water would be a Day 1 priority under Donald Trump.
Public health experts say that fluoride has helped protect Americans’ teeth, particularly in vulnerable communities, and that the evidence doesn’t show that it’s dangerous.1
Kennedy’s fluoride vow was just the latest last-minute assertion by Trump’s surrogates — or Trump himself — that target popular health programs or public health interventions, or generally alarmed people in public health.
First came last Monday’s pledge by Mike Johnson, the GOP House speaker, who said that he’d pursue “massive reform” of the Affordable Care Act if Trump wins.
Two days later, Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of the Trump transition team, said on CNN that he’d begun to doubt vaccines after a 2.5-hour talk with Kennedy, a known vaccine skeptic, and that it would be a good idea to give vaccine data to Kennedy and let him make some recommendations.
On Friday, Trump said that he would put Kennedy in a role working on women’s health. (Trump has repeatedly promised that Kennedy will have a major role addressing food and health issues.)
Then came Saturday and the fluoride vow.
It all adds up to a surreal closing message, and an 11th-hour agenda that would likely undercut public health. Tens of millions of people get covered through the ACA; vaccination and fluoridation have been credited as some of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century.
Some pollsters told me that the GOP pledges could be a deliberate strategy — to find every last vote in what could be a close election. (How many single-issue fluoride voters there are, I don’t know.)
At The Post, we pulled together a quick review of the Republicans’ closing pitches. You can read that here.
GOP’s closing election message on health baffles strategists, worries experts
It’s worth noting: Republicans do have other health messages they could use as a closing pitch. Kennedy has pulled together a “Make America Healthy Again” agenda to tackle chronic disease and childhood illnesses, laying out a number of ideas that have bipartisan support.2
And there’s clearly some opportunism by Democrats who have been itching to pick another fight on the Affordable Care Act, after the law helped them in recent elections.
The Harris campaign jumped on Johnson’s comments last week, insisting that his “no Obamacare” line was a pledge to repeal it. (Johnson has accused Democrats of distorting his comments, though his office wouldn’t tell me what his “massive reform” plans contain or whether he’d rule out another attempt at repeal.)
But no one is forcing Trump surrogates to make these vows to overhaul Obamacare, to question vaccines, to tackle fluoride. And some Republicans in the Trump campaign’s orbit said they were baffled by it.
“Oh Jesus,” a former Trump health official wrote back, after I texted Kennedy’s tweet on fluoride. “I have no idea where this came from.”
Some researchers have argued that fluoride can pose a risk to developing brains. We also don’t need as much of it as we used to, my colleague Annabelle Timsit and I wrote in an explainer at The Post today. But the CDC and others have continued to endorse fluoridation for decades, insisting that the low concentrations in our water are safe.
If you took Kennedy and Trump’s names off it, much of the MAHA agenda sounds a lot like what Democrats want too — reducing the industry’s influence on food and drug regulations, getting chemicals out of food, blocking pharma ads on TV, and other stuff that Sen. Bernie Sanders and other progressives have called for.