Vermont Town’s Water Guy Resigns After Fluoride Conspiracies
Put a conspiracy nut in charge of public services and by golly look what happens. You get nutty policies, like reducing fluoride in water. Or claiming voting machines are a scam. Or Qanon. Election deniers in charge of the election? What can go wrong? Everything we care about,
A small-town water manager had some pretty out-there ideas about fluoride in the water, so much so that he lowered levels of the chemical in the town’s water supply for years without telling anybody for over a decade of nearly 30 years of his position.
Kendall Chamberlin, the now-resigned water and wastewater supervisor in the small Vermont town of Richmond, had been secretly reducing the fluoride levels in the local water supply for years and years. According to an AP report from earlier this month, Chamberlain finally admitted to the town’s Water and Sewer Commission that he had been making those unilateral changes to the town’s water content. He told the town this was “to err on the side of caution,” because his duty “is to to take responsible care and judgment for the protection of public health.”
Chamberlin, who in previous town meeting videos looks like a gussied-up version of Tolkien wizard Radagast the Brown, made excuses that seemed to touch on decade-long fluoride conspiracies in his five-page resignation letter (thanks VTDigger). Chamberlain wrote that he always accurately reported measured fluoride levels in the town’s water system, which were signed off by the town administrator, but he also said he had been keeping levels below state-recommended ranges for more than a decade.
In his letter, he called fluoride “a toxic chemical with significant known health risks,” and said “I cannot in good conscience be a party to this.”
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