Early last year, the Environmental Working Group and the Green Science Policy Institute launched an attack on a family of chemicals known as fluoropolymers used extensively in surgery and critical care and for other medical uses. Headlining their news release “Toxic PFAS Found in Everyday Products—Even Medical Devices!”, the activist NGOs labeled them “the next threat hiding in plain sight,” calling for a global ban on their use—even in lifesaving technology.
The campaign was immediately picked up by familiar media megaphones in Europe: The Guardian in the UK and France’s Le Monde. The global activist group ChemSec, a Sweden-based NGO anchored by Friends of the Earth, known for its hostility to corporations and technology. launched a social media campaign that quickly spread to the U.S. News outlets echoed the claim, reporting that so-called “forever chemicals” were “lurking” in catheters and pacemakers.
This engineered outburst illustrates so much of what is wrong with environmental activism today. The investigation and the inflammatory news release is part of a broader crusade against a vast class of chemicals known as PFAS—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—often lumped together under the term “forever chemicals.” But independent scientists are sounding alarms of their own—not about fluoropolymers, but about the reckless generalization now threatening technologies that are critically essential to health care.
PFAS confusion
The fluoropolymer panic marks the latest chapter in a broader—and increasingly confused—campaign to more tightly regulate PFAS. PFAS is not a chemical. It’s a chemical family—more than 10,000 substances with a wide range of properties.
The first PFAS were developed in the 1930s. Some of them, like PFOA—which has long since been phased out—and PFOS, are persistent, mobile, potentially toxic at high levels, and have been linked to environmental contamination and, in rare cases, health issues. But the crude effort to paint all PFAS chemicals as potentially imperils a class of materials that has saved millions of lives, improved food safety, and underpinned some of the most vital technological advances of the past 50 years.
“Fluoropolymers are not the same as the small-chain PFAS compounds driving contamination concerns,” says Dr. Michael Kleinman, a professor of environmental toxicology at UC Irvine. “They’re essentially biologically immobile. You could implant them in the body—and we do.”
And we have—for decades. Fluoropolymers are high-performance plastics known for their chemical inertness, biocompatibility, non-stick properties, and resistance to extreme temperatures. Brands like Teflon are household names, but fluoropolymers go far beyond frying pans. They’re critical in making smartphones waterproof, in manufacturing semiconductor chips, and in coating wires and insulation in aircraft and electric vehicles to prevent fire.
But perhaps nowhere are they more indispensable than in medicine. According to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), fluoropolymers are used in:
- 8 million diabetes pumps, catheters, and guidewires for surgical procedures annually
- 3 million angioplasty and stent placement procedures
- Over 1 million pacemakers, heart valves, and defibrillators
- 1 million vascular grafts used by dialysis patients
These aren’t speculative benefits. Fluoropolymer-enabled devices have been used in nearly one billion medical interventions globally. They are a foundational material for catheters, stents, surgical meshes, insulin pumps, and implantable sensors.
Fluoropolymer-based medical devices have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for more than 45 years. As the FDA has explained in its approvals, their chemical inertness and stability secures their long-term safety and functionality in the human body. No adverse effects linked to the fluoropolymer material itself have ever been documented in medical literature or regulatory reviews.
Are fluoropolymers PFAS?
Technically, yes—fluoropolymers are part of the PFAS chemical family. But so are thousands of other compounds, and lumping them all together is scientifically unjustifiable. The EPA’s own definitions now acknowledge this diversity, but activists continue to push a simplistic, monolithic—and medically dangerous—view.
Unlike smaller, more mobile PFAS compounds like PFOA, fluoropolymers are large, inert macromolecules. They don’t dissolve in water, don’t bioaccumulate in the body, and don’t permeate cell membranes. In fact, many are so stable and chemically resistant that they pass through the environment unchanged—posing minimal if any toxicity risk.
“They’re inert. They’re high-molecular-weight polymers. They’re not mobile. They’re not bioavailable. They don’t bioaccumulate,” says Amber Wellman, director of sustainability for Chemours’s advanced performance materials business, a major fluoropolymer producer.
A 2018 review published in Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology concluded that fluoropolymers “pose negligible risk to human health or the environment” due to their size and insolubility. Yet activists routinely cite “PFAS” health studies to smear materials that don’t share the same properties or risks.
This is like banning all mushrooms because some are poisonous.
So, if fluoropolymers aren’t toxic, why the outcry?
The challenge remains of legacy emissions from less stable forms of PFAS chemicals. In decades past, many manufacturers used smaller, persistent PFAS as processing aids in the fluoropolymer production process—substances like PFOA, which could escape into air or water. This is a valid concern. It’s estimated that 45% of water supplies in the U.S. have levels that some experts believe are dangerouss, although that claim is hotly disputed, as in almost all cases, the level is very low. Except near a few contaminated hotspots, dangerous lelves of toxicityt has not been established.
This is not like lead contamination; there is not one study that definitively shows that PFAS causes any of the health issues—cancer, immune system suppressions, liver damage,reproductive effects—environmentalists claim based entirely on animal and problematic and far from defnitiive epidemiological research. Current regulations and new ones being drafted are being driven by precaution and worst-case modeling rather than by clear causal evidence at environmental levels.
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The sceintific case against fluoropolymer is even weaker. It focuses on how fluoropolymers were made, not the safety of the materials themselves nor how they are made today. Nonetheless. under intense public pressure and facing many lawsuits, the fluoropolymer industry and the companies that use their products have moved to remove persistent them. McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Chick-fil-A. among other consumer-facing companies, eliminated PFAS from food packaging, even though the type of plastic used is not considered a health threat.
In 2024, 3M agreed to pay between $10 billion and $12.5 billion to US public water systems that had detected PFAS in their water supplies to pay for remediation and future testing, though the company did not admit liability. 3M, Chemours, and Daikin have phased out problematic processing aids like PFOA. No suits have specifically targeted fluoropolymers, although they are increasingly being lumped into the broader PFAS category by some activist groups, although they are nontoxic and pose no health risk. The unrelenting attacks has created increasing regulatory and reputational risk.
Recogniing the need and market for fluropolymers for speciality uses, some firms have stayed the course, continuing to make them. Fluoropolymer manufacturing methods use non-toxic alternatives or recapture and destroy emissions. A 2022 European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) review noted these shifts, acknowledging the critical uses of fluoropolymers in medical devices and strategic equipment, recommended targeted oversight, but not blanket bans..
Who’s behind the campaigns?
Activist organizations like EWG, Natural Resources Defense Council Safer States, Green Science Policy Institute, Center for Environmental Health and Toxic-Free Future — all of which work closely with tort firms that regularly leverage their campaigns and the media panic they spawn — have been driving the push to restrict all PFAS. 
Watchdog critics argue that these groups often blur science and fear. “Perfluoroalkyl substances have numerous important applications and their total elimination is out of the question.,” says Dr. Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. He argues “it’s not possible” to conclude, as activist groups and tort lawyers claim, that they are responsible for all of the alleged health issues.
Many activist lobby groups work hand-in-hand with tort lawyers or receive funding from philanthropic foundations with ties to class-action litigators. These firms—many of which are already embroiled in billion-dollar lawsuits against PFAS manufacturers—stand to benefit from expanding the “toxic PFAS” definition to include widely used but safe consumer, medical, and industrial products.
Global pushback—and potential policy and healthcare chaos
Europe is currently considering a sweeping PFAS ban under REACH regulations. Yet even the precationary principle-obsessed European Commission has acknowledged that medical exemptions must be made for fluoropolymers. That begs the question: if fluoropolymers are too important to ban in hospitals, why are they unsafe in semiconductor labs or aviation components, which are being targeted?
AIMBE warns that failure to differentiate between essential and hazardous PFAS could “jeopardize patient access to critical treatments.” The implications go beyond medicine. Fluoropolymers are essential to:
- 5G and 6G telecommunications: insulating base station hardware
- Electric vehicle batteries: providing thermal and chemical resistance
- Green energy: enabling high-efficiency hydrogen fuel cells and solar panels
- Defense and aerospace: ensuring nonflammable wiring and corrosion resistance in satellites, jets, and submarines
According to the Financial Times, there is widespread apprehension that eliminating fluoropolymers without viable alternatives could compromise product quality and safety, potentially leading to increased reliance on imports from regions with less stringent regulations. Some companies have tested replacements for PFAS-based components but found them significantly less effective, leading to safety and performance issues.
A 2024 study conducted by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency estimates potential losses in earnings could reach €20 billion over 20 years.
Regulation should be rational, not radical
Science demands nuance, not a virtue among environmental groups or their tort lawyer partners. Fluoropolymers are not mobile, bioaccumulative, or toxic—and banning them would cause more harm than good. Nuance is not a strong trait of aggressive NGOs and tort lawyers. They are adept at manipulating the media conversation and recruiting legislative allies. Many adopted and proposed PFAS bans have minimal nuance, forcing manufacturers to scramble and increasing the risk of medical device shortages.
In April, New Mexico became the eleventh state to enact a law banning PFAS, and 29 states in total are debating restrictions. But New Mexico also voted to explicitly exempt fluoropolymers from its regulations. Ohio is considering similar legislation. West Virginia and Delaware already have more nuanced regulations that protect medical equipment. Maine, which has strict PFAS regulations, already exempts “currently unavoidable use” of PFAS, including in semiconductors, lab equipment, and medical devices.
Proposals to broadly exempt fluoropolymers are opposed or viewed warily by most environmental advocacy groups, particularly ones with ties to aggressive law firms that are posed to reap billions of dollars based on speculative science . Gretchen Salter from Safer States says such exemptions undermine the intent of PFAS legislation to protect public health, arguing that fluoropolymers, like other PFAS, are persistent in the environment. “They are dangerous at every stage of their life, from production to use to disposal, she claims. But even Salter agrees that some exceptions, such as for medical devices, are reasonable—in the short term. “There might be essential uses for PFAS right now,” she says. “But we want to spur the search for safer alternatives.”
The case for rationally regulating all PFAS is already lost, considering how easy it is to generate hysteria around chemicals. The debate around how to regulate different types of PFAS must evolve—from reflexive one-size-fits-all scare-mongering to more precision risk management. The Trump Administration’s EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, has moved to delay the implementation of some PFAS regulations, although it has not specifically addressed possible exemptions for some uses of fluoropolymers.
Let’s hope we can find a way to manage risks more intelligently—by distinguishing between chemistries, improving oversight of manufacturing practices, and encouraging innovation in safer processing technologies. The best we can hope for going forward is not to also ban demonstrably safe and beneficial fluoropolymers. If regulators fail to draw these lines, the real casualties won’t be just industrial profits. They’ll be cancer patients, cardiac patients, and the millions who rely every day on invisible technologies that quietly save lives.
Jon Entine is executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project. Follow him on X at @jonentine.
