(LifeSiteNews) — With the stroke of its governor’s pen, Utah has become the first U.S. state to ban adding fluoride to its public drinking water supply.
Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed the GOP-sponsored measure into law on Thursday. The ban will go into effect on May 7.
Adding fluoride to water as a means of cavity prevention has long been practiced by jurisdictions across the United States with the support of the American Dental Association, the Academy of Pediatrics, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
However, the practice has come under increasing scrutiny as reports have emerged suggesting either negative health impacts or no impact at all from the additive.
As of 2022, about 44% of Utah’s population were being supplied with fluoride-treated water according to an NBC News report.
“You would think you would see drastically different outcomes with half the state not getting it and half the state getting it. I’ve talked to a lot of dentists. We haven’t seen that,” Governor Cox told ABC4. “So it’s got to be a really high bar for me if we’re going to require people to be medicated by their government.”
“Community water fluoridation and informed consent, which is foundational to good health care, cannot coexist,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Stephanie Gricius, told Fox News. “I believe strongly in individual choice when it comes to what prescriptions we put into our bodies.”
Gricius told Fox that the Utah county with the lowest amount of decay does not, in fact, add fluoride.
Water fluoridation was a top-tier campaign issue in the battle for medical freedom last year. During the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump told NBC News that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s proposal to remove fluoride from public water supplies “sounds okay” to him.
Kennedy, now the Trump administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), has suggested that the additive is “associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”
Water fluoridation also garnered national headlines when a bombshell report published by the Department of Health and Human Services last August revealed that excessive fluoride consumption in children has been linked to a two- to five-point IQ reduction. The startling admission prompted Edward Chen, an Obama-appointed federal judge, to order the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to strengthen regulations around fluoride.
Roughly 200 million Americans currently live in communities supplied with fluoridated water.
Lawmakers in Florida, Ohio, and South Carolina have also proposed restricting the increasingly controversial additive.
The U.S. widely began fluoridating its water supply decades ago as the result of a PR campaign led by Edward Bernays — author of the book Propaganda — who also convinced American women to take up smoking cigarettes.
“You can get practically any idea accepted if doctors are in favor,” the late Bernays explained. “The public is willing to accept it because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he knows or doesn’t know.”
Bernays jump-started his career by selling the First World War to Americans as the war that would “Make the World Safe for Democracy,” part of work that he himself called “psychological warfare,” with the goal that he described as the “engineering of consent.”
