Anti Solar Quack Outs Himself as Fluoridation Crank, Too

WGRT, Your Great Music Station, Port Huron, Michigan:

At a recent St. Clair County Board meeting, Dr. Remington Nevin, the county’s medical director, raised health concerns about a 900-acre solar plant planned for Fort Gratiot. Nevin argued that noise from the facility could harm residents’ well-being and that the county should intervene. Over two dozen local residents also expressed frustration with the lack of communication and raised concerns about property values.

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I’ve been to some strange public meetings, but one of the strangest was a few months ago before the St. Clair County Board of Public Health in Port Huron, Michigan.
It was called not to take action on anything, but more as a public accusatory bitch session for a cult-like anti-clean energy group, seemingly inspired by the new County Director of Public Health, Dr. Remington Nevin, who had been speaking out publicly about an imaginary set of “dangers” of solar energy.

Bear in mind, this is a project that has only been proposed, not permitted. Not a single shovel of earth has been turned.
All the more interesting to hear members of that crowd, even the one below, a self described medical professional, rattle off a list of health impacts that are already occurring, so deadly are the proposed panels.

Now, Dr Nevin has given us another indication of how far off the reservation he’s strayed.

Bridge (Michigan):

On the far east side of Michigan, the future of fluoride in drinking water — long an ordinary practice for preventing tooth decay — has suddenly provoked passionate debate.

Public meetings in St. Clair County, about an hour northeast of Detroit, have filled with people weighing in. One man waved his Fixodent denture cream before the county commissioners, suggesting that his own experience showed what would happen if local communities stopped treatment.

“I am an unfluoridated child,” he declared, “with a set of uppers and lowers.”

Another man, speaking to the county’s Advisory Board of Health, said that personal responsibility should be factored into the conversation. “I think there are some 3 Musketeer bars, Snicker bars that should be accounted for. Some Coca-Colas.”

And a young man used his time in the public comments to address not just fluoridation, but the county medical director who’s trying to get rid of it. He accused him of grandstanding to land a job with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health and human services secretary, by making moves that “lowered the quality of life for underserved people.”

The raucous arguments were spurred by a three-page memo sent in June to the Advisory Health Board by Dr. Remington Nevin, the medical director of St. Clair County’s Health Department. It urges the department to take steps to “prohibit the addition of fluoride” to public water systems because, he wrote in bold print, the additive is “a plausible developmental neurotoxicant” — a claim that runs counter to the assessment of many leading experts and health agencies, which have long celebrated fluoridation as a public health triumph.

Nevin recommended fluoride restrictions that would apply to any system located in the county and serving county residents. Potentially, that could include the Great Lakes Water Authority, which provides water to nearly 40% of the state’s population.

Drinking water fluoridation, which was pioneered in Michigan in 1945, led to a massive drop in tooth decay. Even with the rise of fluoride in toothpaste and other products, it’s credited with a 25% decrease in cavities. But skeptics increasingly hold sway in government, as ProPublica recently reported. Those opponents include Kennedy, the nation’s top health official, who has called fluoride “industrial waste.”
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Dr. Mert Aksu, president of the Michigan Oral Health Coalition’s board and dean of the University of Detroit Mercy’s dental school, said he’s hustling up to the public meetings in St. Clair County because it’s the duty of professionals “to make sure that the decisions that are being made within our communities are being made based upon scientific merit.”

Speaking broadly about the influence now wielded by fluoride skeptics, Aksu said, “We have opened ourselves up to opportunities from misinformed people who want to use this issue for political purposes.”

At an August meeting of the county commissioners, Kimberly Raleigh, interim executive director of the Michigan Oral Health Coalition, read a letter in support of fluoridation that was signed by the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, the Michigan Dental Association, the Indiana Dental Association, the Pennsylvania Coalition for Oral Health and dozens of others.

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We thought at one time, that having all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips would put an end to ignorance, but we never reckoned with the power of willful human ignorance.