A federal appeals court has overturned a historic federal ruling that found that fluoride poses an “unreasonable risk,” sending the case back to a district court and directing the court to ignore evidence presented after 2020.
On May 21, a federal appeals court overturned a September 2024 federal ruling that concluded that water fluoridation “poses an unreasonable risk of reduced IQ in children.” The appeals court ruled in favor of arguments put forth by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), namely that the district court had “abused its discretion when it refused to rule on the first trial record” in summer 2020.
The new ruling comes nearly a decade after plaintiffs first filed a citizen petition under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in November 2016. The EPA denied the petition, and the groups sued, leading to a decade-long legal saga between the EPA, parents of children impacted by water fluoridation, the Fluoride Action Network (FAN), and Food & Water Watch (FWW).
The lawsuit eventually made its way to a San Francisco courtroom in June 2020. At the conclusion of two weeks of testimony, Judge Edward Chen delayed ruling on the lawsuit. By August 2020, he placed the case in abeyance pending a review of the literature on fluoride from the US National Toxicology Program (NTP). The wait for the NTP review took nearly four years.
In September 2024, after reviewing the NTP’s historic report on water fluoridation, Judge Chen ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor and ordered the EPA to take regulatory action and implement a rule to reduce the harm posed by water fluoridation.
That decision has now been overturned by the federal appeals court, and the case has been sent back to Chen. The judge must now rule exclusively on the data presented in the 2020 phase of the convoluted legal process.
https://tlavagabond.substack.com/p/federal-court-overturns-historic