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An article published by US National Library of Medicine - National Institutes of Health focused on a debate during the 1950's and 1960's about the fluoridation of water. Excerpts from the article show a haunting similarity to recent similar debates about the Covid-19 vaccines. Doesn't this look familiar?
The Covid-19 Vaccine is not the first time that compulsory health measures have been opposed. Then, as now this can be necessary.Debating Water Fluoridation Before Dr. Strangelove, Catherine Carstairs, PhD(link)
(Government document so no copyright issues)
In the movie Dr. Strangelove, General Ripper claimed that water fluoridation was destroying “our precious bodily fluids”—a reference to the claim that water fluoridation was a conspiracy designed to weaken US willpower and make the country susceptible to a Communist takeover….
There were doctors and dentists who testified against fluoridation at these hearings, but for the most part they did not have the same prestige as the people who appeared before the Delaney committee two years earlier. Leading the crusade in 1954 was Seattle radiologist Frederick Exner. Exner had been president of both the local Anti-Tuberculosis League and the State Radiological Society, but he had no record as a researcher. He complained that the leading fluoridation scientists were all just quoting and citing one another. He pointed to errors in McClure’s study of fluoride excretion, argued that children consume widely varying amounts of water, suggested that mottling was more severe than Dean’s studies indicated, and asserted that dentists varied widely in the number of cavities they found. He condemned fluoridation as “totalitarian medicine” and described the fluoridation trials at Newburgh and Grand Rapids as a “flagrant violation of the most sacred laws of God and man.”….
The other leading opponent was George Waldbott, an allergist from Detroit, Michigan. Waldbott did not attend the hearings, but he did send a statement.… In the years to come, Exner and Waldbott would become the leading scientific voices in the antifluoridation movement. Exner and Waldbott’s antifluoride work was widely accessible. In 1957, they published The American Fluoridation Experiment with a mainstream press. Written in clear, passionate prose, Exner and Waldbott argued that the fluoride experiment marked an unprecedented expansion of the powers of public health officials into the lives of the public, that it would provide entire communities with a medication that would only benefit a few, and that more research needed to be done because it was likely that fluorides would accumulate in the body and cause damage to bones, teeth, and joints, as well as gastric distress.
