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Guest Essay

By Emily Oster

Emily Oster, an economist and the founder of ParentData.org, is the author of “Expecting Better” and “Cribsheet.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this month that the new Trump administration would recommend removing fluoride from public water supplies. The suggestion that fluoride was unsafe was immediately criticized by many public health experts as anti-science misinformation.

But there’s a real danger to painting everyone with concerns about fluoride as a conspiracy theorist. It’s not that we should remove fluoride from tap water (we shouldn’t), but fluoride is a complex topic, and glossing over that complexity — as public health experts and agencies often do — leaves people understandably skeptical.

Public health agencies typically tell people what to do and what not to do, but they don’t regularly explain why — or why people might hear something different from others. They also often fail to prioritize. In the end, advice for a range of topics is delivered with the same level of confidence and, seemingly, the same level of urgency. The problem is that when people find one piece of guidance is overstated, they may begin to distrust everything.

Consider three topics of much public discussion: measles vaccines, raw milk and water fluoridation. All three represent fault lines between what is said by public health agencies and by Mr. Kennedy and other skeptics. Where their messages differ is in the strength and complexity of the evidence.

Measles vaccines have decades of safety data and save lives every day. Concern about autism has been conclusively debunked in large and reliable data sets. Measles is extremely contagious, and without widespread vaccination, many people........

© The New York Times