Dr. Paul Connett is recognized worldwide as a leader in the movement to eliminate fluoride from the municipal water supplies, and I’m pleased to be working with him to achieve this goal. Earlier this year, he used frequent flyer miles to visit New Zealand and in a month-long tour gave presentations to communities all over the country.
In this interview, he shares some of the successes the movement has experienced. Dr. Connett has great hopes that New Zealand will move to ban water fluoridation.
“New Zealand has the ability to say no,” he says.
“It became a nuclear free zone and said no to American nuclear ships.
They have the capacity to be a maverick…
I gave a talk to the Ministry of Health and we were expecting two or three people – in actual fact, 25 people showed up.”
What’s Driving the Irrational Water Fluoridation Mandates?
According to Dr. Connett, with the science we now have on fluoride, the current water fluoridation mandates simply do not make any sense. If it is to continue, then the authorities will have to come up with some rational explanations to explain this irrational behavior.
“Teeth are important, but I can’t believe that all these governments are mobilized to protect this miniscule amount of saved teeth,” he says.
“What is the rational explanation for this irrational behavior?…. We know why the rank and file continue; because they are busy doctors and dentists; they don’t have time to read the literature. They just mouth what they are told by their professional bodies.
It’s the attitude of the people at the top of these chains of command; top of the dental associations, top of the health departments, in our (U.S.) case, the Department of Health and Human Services. To lose fluoridation means to lose credibility…”
He may be right, because if they lose credibility on this issue, they stand to lose credibility on other public health policies, such as the childhood vaccination schedule, for example. After all, they must have the public’s trust in order to effectively oversee public health policy, and that’s part of the reason for why they’re fighting so hard to stave this issue off.
“I said to the [New Zealand] Ministry of Health: If you had the courage, you would gain credibility. If you came out now and said, it’s a mistake, or we found out that it only works topically; there is no point in putting it in people’s water… [Then] they would regain the public’s trust.
The people will be so impressed that they have had the integrity to actually tell the truth…then maybe they’ll gain back some credibility on some of these other public health practices.”
Why Water Fluoridation is “A Stupid Thing To Do”
There are very good reasons for not putting fluoride in the water supplies. It is a drug. If you wanted some to ingest, you’d have to get a prescription. And there are good reasons for why we don’t purposely add any other drugs to our water.
As Dr. Connett says:
“We don’t use the public water supply to deliver medicine because it’s a stupid thing to do. You can’t control the dose. You can’t control who gets it. [There’s] no individual supervision. Of course it violates the individual’s right to informed consent to medicine.
So, first of all, you start by saying this is a crazy thing to do, for most people. Then you say, what are the dangers? I spent 15 years pursuing the dangers, but then I woke up one day and said, if it doesn’t work anyway; why would we takeany risk at all? Why would we lower a kid’s IQ by even a small few number of IQ points? Why would we run the risk of making our bones more brittle when we get old? Why would we run the risk of arthritis? Why would we run the risk of lowering thyroid function?
Why is it that the governments that fluoridate don’t investigate any of the things that I have just listed, and yet spend most of their time attacking the methodology of the studies that have found harm in India and China and elsewhere? [The loss of credibility is], I think, the most rational explanation that I have come up with.”