President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared Monday that they’ve found a link between autism and acetaminophen, commonly known as Tylenol, despite scant evidence of a link.
Speaking from the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Trump said women should not take acetaminophen “during the entire pregnancy.”
“With Tylenol, don’t take it! Don’t take it,” Trump insisted. “All pregnant women should talk to their doctors for more information about limiting the use of this medication while pregnant.
“And I want to say it right now, and you know the way I look at it, don't take it,” Trump said. “Don't take it. There's no downside in not taking it.”
He said the Food and Drug Administration would begin notifying doctors that the use of acetaminophen “can be associated” with an increased risk of autism, but did not immediately provide any medical evidence for the FDA's new recommendation.
Trump and Kennedy, both of whom also repeated some debunked and other unfounded links between vaccines and autism, which affects 1 in 31 children in the U.S., according to CDC statistics. RFK had earlier promised he would reveal “what has caused the autism epidemic” by September.
“So taking Tylenol is not good, all right, I'll say it — it's not good for this reason,” Trump said. “They are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary.”
Throughout his announcement, Trump repeated numerous conspiracy theories about autism, including debunked claims about mercury in vaccines and the idea that certain populations like the Amish do not develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Tylenol is the most commonly used pain reliever and many women use acetaminophen, Tylenol’s scientific name, for fever or pain. Trump struggled to pronounce the name of the drug during the announcement.
Still, Trump was adamant. “Ideally, you don’t take it all, but if you have to, if you can’t tough it out, if there’s a problem, you’re going to end up doing it,” Trump said of pregnant women, noting that mothers should only take the lowest possible dose in the worst-case health scenarios.
'Fight like hell not to take it,' Trump said, and also urged parents not to give it to children.
Most experts say that the link between autism and Tylenol use during pregnancy is minimal at best. A major study in Sweden of more than 2 million children released last year found that “Acetaminophen use during pregnancy was not associated with children’s risk of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability in sibling control analyses.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also pushed back and said that use of Tylenol is safe during pregnancy.
“Today’s announcement by HHS is not backed by the full body of scientific evidence and dangerously simplifies the many and complex causes of neurologic challenges in children,” Steven J. Fleischman, the president of ACOG, said in a statement. “It is highly unsettling that our federal health agencies are willing to make an announcement that will affect the health and well-being of millions of people without the backing of reliable data.”
Kenvue, the parent company of Tylenol, pushed back on Trump’s claims, saying in a statement to Axios “acetaminophen is the safest pain reliever option for pregnant women as needed throughout their entire pregnancy.”
“We believe independent, sound science clearly shows that taking acetaminophen does not cause autism,” the statement said. “We strongly disagree with any suggestion otherwise and are deeply concerned with the health risk this poses for expecting mothers.”
But the president repeatedly recommended that women not take Tylenol.
“That's, for instance, in cases of extremely high fever that you feel you can't tough it out, you can't do it, I guess there's that,” Trump said. “But if you can't tough it out, if you can't do it, that's what you're gonna have to do. You'll take a Tylenol, but it'll be very sparingly.”
During his announcement, Trump also rehashed the idea that vaccines play a role in autism, despite repeated studies that have shown no such correlation. The author of the original study, Andrew Wakefield, would eventually lose his medical license and the study would be retracted by The Lancet in 2010.
“And they pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies, it's a disgrace,” he said.
Furthermore, Trump said that “We want no mercury in the vaccine” even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there is no evidence of mercury in vaccines causing adverse harm and vaccine manufacturers have either significantly reduced or eliminated the use of thimerosal, a type of mercury in vaccines.
Colin Killick, the executive director for the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, criticized the efforts by the Trump administration in an interview before the announcement.
“And the other thing, of course, is even if we knew that there was a statistical correlation between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and autism, it wouldn't necessarily follow that that meant that the acetaminophen was causing the autism,” Killick told The Independent.
In addition to the announcement around acetaminophen, the administration said that the Food and Drug Administration would establish leucovorin, a type of folic acid, as the “first recognized therapeutic the for children with folate deficiencies and certain types of autism spectrums.
But Helen Tager Flusberg, professor emerita at Boston University and head of the Coalition of Autism Scientists, told The Independent it was “way too premature” to recommend that autistic children take leucovorin.
“They have different, each of these studies use different endpoints, so we don't actually know what it contributes to,” she said. “We need large-scale, randomized, controlled trials, which will be impossible to do because this is something that you can buy on Amazon. So it would be impossible to actually do this kind of trial now.”
The CDC reported earlier this year that the number of children between the ages of 4 and 8 with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder increased to 1 in 31 — up from 1 in 150 in the year 2000, a rise also fueled by expansion of the way autism is defined and diagnosed. In addition, it found that the number of boys was much narrower, at 1 in 21 and as narrow as 1 in 12.5 for boys in California.
“I was told that's in California, where they have a, for some reason, a more severe problem,” he said.
But that is also largely attributed to the fact that California has one of the best screening processes and detection rates for autism. And boys have long been diagnosed at a higher rate than girls while girls are often overlooked into adulthood.
In the same token, Trump talked about various groups who supposedly have no rates of autism.
“I mean, there's a rumor, and I don't know if it's so or not, that Cuba, they don't have Tylenol because they don't have the money to fight Tylenol, and they have virtually no autism,” he said. Cuba has rougly 690 children with ASD for every 100,000 children.
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