The Last American Vagabond - Dr. Philipe Grandjean Exposes The History Of Fluoride’s Harms

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

On February 2nd, 2024, TLAV lead investigator Derrick Broze interviewed Dr. Phillipe Grandjean regarding his work on mercury, the toxicity of fluoride, and the pressure he has faced for speaking out. Dr. Grandjean is one of the expert witnesses testifying on behalf of the Fluoride Action Network and plaintiffs in the Fluoride Lawsuit.Grandjean is a Danish scientist working in environmental medicine. He is the head of the Environmental Medicine Research Unit at the University of Southern Denmark and adjunct professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health.!function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src="https://rumble.com/embedJS/u2q643"+(arguments[1].video?'.'+arguments[1].video:'')+"/?url="+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+"&args="+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, "script", "Rumble"); Rumble("play", {"video":"v48kbcq","div":"rumble_v48kbcq"});Source Links:https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/fluoride-trial-scientist-says-he-was-threatened-because-of-fluoride-study/https://www.givesendgo.com/FluorideTrial Bitcoin Donations Are Appreciated:www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/bitcoin-donation(3FSozj9gQ1UniHvEiRmkPnXzHSVMc68U9f) Get full access to The Last American Vagabond Substack at tlavagabond.substack.com/subscribe

I'm Philippe Ganshan. I'm a physician and professor at the University of Southern Denmark and research professor at the University of Rhode Island. Great. And you're here testifying in the fluoride lawsuit, the fluoride trial as an expert witness. Before we get into that, could you provide a little bit of background on your research into mercury? You're one of the leading experts in mercury and toxicity of that. Could you speak about that? I've done population studies on mercury exposure in particular in regard to the adverse effects on brain development in children that have been exposed since the beginning of life to mercury from their mother's diet. And I've also done research on fluoride.

It started about 50 years ago because Copenhagen in Denmark was where fluoride poisoning was discovered in the form of what's called skeletal fluorosis, which means that the bones become denser, and on the x-ray it looks like marble. and it also tends to get more brittle so that you would more easily break your arm. And way back then, when that was discovered in the 1930s, it was also discovered that the workers who had these high exposures had symptoms from the central nervous system. That is that fluoride likely was affecting the functions of the brain.

So we have now lately followed that up in regard to brain development in small children. And so before we get into the lawsuit itself, you mentioned the research in the 1930s, and that was Kaj Roham, is that how you say the name, say his name? And could you speak a little bit about what you were sort of touching on it? He was studying the cryolite mines in Greenland. So the early studies that were done in the 1930s, were carried out by Kai Rojohn, a physician and later professor at the University of Copenhagen, and he published his thesis on the bone disease of the workers. And what I did later on

was to follow up by looking at the mortality of the chryorite workers who had this elevated exposure to fluoride. And the main finding was that there was an excess occurrence of bladder cancer with the risk increasing with the duration of employment at the factory, that is the duration of fluoride exposure. But very little attention has been paid to this lately because fluoride has been oftentimes considered a subject that one should not deal with because fluoride is considered very beneficial for dental health. And here we are almost 100 years later, and there's this lawsuit happening here in the United

States. And as you said, it's really still probably the majority of the public is not very aware of the various concerns related to fluoride and water fluoridation. And this lawsuit is specifically dealing with the effects of fluoride on neurodevelopment and claims of lowering IQ in children. Do you support the statements of the National Toxicology Program draft report that concluded that there was an association between higher fluoride exposure and lower IQ and children? I do support the NTP report. It was thoroughly done by highly qualified colleagues. What I have done is to study the association between the mother's exposure to fluoride

and the children's brain development, that is, the IQ at school age, at about 8.7. And Denmark is a country where addition of fluoride to drinking water is illegal. So we studied a population with background exposures to fluoride that is lower than fluoridated communities in the United States. And fortunately, our study didn't show that there was any association between the fluoride exposure and the IQ of the children at the background level that we have in Denmark. And so you're being called as an expert witness. You were testifying today, cross-examined by the EPA, by the government, underwent some pretty intense scrutiny. Do you feel, how do you feel about your testimony?

I mean, do you feel you were able to convey your points and your expert viewpoint fairly? What we did was to collaborate between the Danish study and the two North America. studies, one carried out with support from the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Mexico and the other one carried out in Canada. And when we merge all the findings, we can see that there is a tendency, the higher the fluoride exposure, curing fetal life, that is, from the mother's exposure, the greater the loss in IQ at school age. And it's like the overall average is that for each milligram of additional fluoride, the child will lose two IQ points.

And one milligram is something that can easily happen in this country because that is 0.7 milligrams of fluoride per liter of drinking water in the fluoridated communities. And if you drink a couple of liters of community water, you easily get a couple of milligrams of extra fluoride, and that is certainly, according to our findings, is associated with a loss in cognitive function, that is, an IQ of the baby and the child as we examined at school age. And what you just described there also doesn't include extra sources of fluoride exposure from food or pesticides and these other things, correct?

There is, of course, a certain background exposure to fluoride, because, as, for example, some fluoride in seafood. And certainly in this country, if you have fluoridated water, then that may also affect the production of soft drinks, whether it's Coca-Cola or whatever it is, if it's based on fluoridated drinking water, or canned food or restaurant food. so the fluoridation of drinking water may affect people beyond the communities where there is a fluoridation that has been approved locally.

In the first phase of the trial, when you testified back in 2020, there was some discussion about one of your studies that also found similar conclusions about fluoride being a neurotoxin. and if I'm reading this correctly, if I remember this correctly, you stated that you were coerced by a colleague at the Harvard Dental School to sort of sign a statement that sort of downplayed the significance of your study. Could you speak to that incident? To understand fluoride better, we carried out a joint analysis of all of the publications we could find that related to early life exposure to fluoride and brain function in childhood. And that got published in a journal that's put out by the National Institutes of Health.

And when that was published, a professor from Harvard University came to my office and asked me, to sign a statement that my work on fluoride had nothing to do with fluoridation. And he actually wrote this draft. I still have it in my possession. And since I didn't sign this immediately, he instead went to my dean and had the dean sign a statement that he supported water fluoridation in accordance with the policy of the Centers for Disease Control CDC.

My dean had not yet seen my publication on fluoride, and therefore he had no concern signing it. And later on, I was told by the leadership at how I, that my research on fluoride was unwanted and had never been approved by Harvard. So because we couldn't agree on what I would consider academic freedom, I left Harvard. And another statement you made in 2020, you said that the fluoride lobby, in quotes, had infiltrated the World Health Organization Committee and that they were seeking to exclude any mention of harmful effects of fluoride. Could you speak to that, your experience or your involvement or awareness of the,

for lack of a better term, fluoride lobby influencing the who? My experience with fluoride actually goes back many years because the World Health Organization asked me to help them develop what they called an environmental health criteria document on fluoride. So I drafted that document that reviewed the sources of fluoride in the environment, including drinking water, the animal data, and the epidemiology. And W.H.O. then called a working group to do that. developed the final version of that based on my draft.

And what happened was that the working group had, I think it was a majority of people with dental research backgrounds. And they inserted changes in my draft indicating that fluoride could perhaps be toxic but only at immense concentrations and when I protested and said that in the in accordance with the scientific documentation it would be wrong to insert the word immense and so the working group asked me to kindly go to the library and bring the documentation back. And so I said under the circumstances, I could not take responsibility for being part of the authorship.

So I would rather leave the WHO meeting, which I did. It's the only time I've ever done that. but I was confronted with colleagues from the dental science, and they insisted on changes that I found scientifically inappropriate. And so W.J.O. published a document, and without my name, because I'd asked to have my name stricken. but then they inserted some other colleague's name as the author of the draft, which is of course erroneous, but that was where W.HO felt was necessary in order to protect the interests of water fluidation.

Okay, final question here. you know, with everything you just shared there about meetings at the World Health Organization, you know, colleagues at Harvard pressuring you, we're living in a time, at least in the United States, where a lot of Americans are told that there's an anti-science sentiment, that people don't trust scientists, and some people would say there's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the science. Others say, you know, you're believing in conspiracy theories. You know, for example, with fluoride. As a journalist, talking about fluoride doesn't get you any new friends. It definitely gets you called crazy for even addressing this subject.

Would you have any advice to the general public of how lay people can try to navigate this when you have scientists on one side like yourself and Dr. Bruce Lanfier and Howard who, who seem to be really trying to bring the truth of following the science wherever it goes? And then there clearly has some influence from industry and other powers. How can we navigate that, you know, still trying to hold on to the scientific method but also not just blindly trusting people? It's a problem for researchers who deal with topics that are relevant to society.

On the one hand, this is what we really need science for, because we need the documentation to make prudent and responsible decisions in the policy making for the benefit of public health. Unfortunately, sometimes there are vested interests, and it could be industries that depend on production of toxic chemicals. That will be a very straightforward example. But in regard to fluoride, it's a very unusual situation because it's colleagues from within the health sector who are fighting their colleagues who work on the toxicology of fluoride. And so I think it's important for the public to know that they have to retain a little bit of skepticism. We're trying to be objective in science.

I believe that I am, but sometimes when my findings are counter to other interests, then unfortunately there will be counter actions so to speak and that may not be understood by the public that there's really something going on here which is beyond science but has to do with the applications of that particular science so I would still say that I'm also the editor of a scientific journal. We try to communicate the best of science, science that is valid, and science that we can respond to and react on because we trust it.

But it's clear that it is possible that counterreactions can happen, like it has happened with fluoride. And so I do my best to communicate what I know, also through my teaching and through public communication. But it's important that we convey that we can't be sure that 100% of what's published as science is necessarily correct and fluoride and well I mean that there are lots of examples like PFAS or lead where there has been so-called scientific publications that were really rather a matter of marketing