For decades, the war over fluoridation has been going on.
The war is sometimes hot, sometimes cold, but the hostility between the pro- and anti-fluoridation sides has never cooled down completely. In many ways, it mirrors the hostilities over vaccinations, but with an important twist: vaccines, to the extent that they are both safe and effective, protect not just the individual who gets vaccinated but have an external benefit to society as a whole by helping reduce the disease burden on others.
If enough people get vaccinated (with, as I said, a safe and effective vaccine), herd immunity can develop to deadly diseases and, as in the case of smallpox, even get wiped out.
I don’t want to get into the weeds arguing about the safety of individual vaccines or whether each of them is as effective as claimed–the debates over each of them aren’t the point of…
