A few years ago, I was crossing the playground at school when a fellow parent caught up to me to talk about the flu vaccine, which is offered every year to primary school-aged kids in Britain.
“I’m just not sure about it,” she said in a lowered voice, looking worried. “And vaccines in general. Don’t some of them cause autism?”
At the time, I had a hard time rearranging my face into something less reminiscent of a grimace – or an overt eye-roll. But perhaps it wasn’t her fault: you only have to look at the madness on social media platforms like X to see the anti-vax brigade out in force, spluttering nonsense about the Covid vaccine and the MMR (for measles, mumps and rubella).
The real culprit (in the latter case), of course, is Andrew Wakefield – the disgraced former doctor and fraudster struck off after making the false claim in 1998 that the MMR vaccine was linked to developmental disorders such as autism. Fast forward 25 years or so and his unsavoury legacy still persists as a dangerous and destructive urban legend. It has led directly – helped massively by Donald Trump’s administration, which is presiding over the US’s largest outbreak of measles in 25 years – to a worrying rise in measles cases in this country; even deaths.
And now we have Donald “inject bleach to cure Covid” Trump, making a pointless, false and downright dangerous claim about a link between Tylenol – better known in the UK as paracetamol – and autism, contrary to all medical guidelines.
In a meandering press conference lasting more than an hour last night, Trump said there had been a “meteoric” rise in autism, which he said was “among the most alarming public health developments in history”, and urged pregnant women to “tough it out” and refrain from taking Tylenol, an over-the-counter painkiller sold in the Uk as paracetemol, as he claimed it was linked to autism.
Never one to avoid stealing the limelight, Trump had previously teased the announcement before a crowd of people in Arizona who had gathered for a memorial service for the hard-right Maga activist Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed on 10 September: “I think you’re going to find it to be amazing. I think we found an answer to autism.” He went on to say his administration “won’t let it happen anymore”.
Given the lack of any solid scientific or medical evidence linking the painkiller to the development disorder (a widescale study of 2 million children in Sweden, last year, found no connection between the active drug acetaminophen – which is sold under the brand name “Tylenol” in the US – and autistic spectrum disorder or ASD), we can only guess what “it” entails. Not soothing a headache? Not bringing down a fever, which can be – in itself – extremely dangerous for pregnant women? Not reducing cramps, muscle aches, a sore throat?
Shame on you for sparking fear into vulnerable people who are already struggling to access adequate healthcare under the unthinkably cruel and privatised American private healthcare system; shame on you for capitalising on a lack of understanding, education, access to information and medical resources that you, personally, have cut.
Shame on you for making autistic people the target of your continued attacks on global healthcare and stigmatising them further; shame on you for placing the blame – and you can bet it’s calculated – on women, pregnant women, who we can well imagine might now enter a government “watch list” for the most unthinkable of crimes: taking a couple of perfectly safe tablets for a headache.
For pregnant women, as we already know, in Trump’s America are deemed responsible for their own miscarriages. For their own rapes. For their own ectopic pregnancies. They can even be jailed, for it. And now, if a child is born showing signs of ASD – and it usually presents in the first two years of life – this could pave the way for mothers to be criminalised for that, too.
Who’s to say we won’t have ICE-style swat teams descending on the houses of women who have given birth to kids with developmental differences – for which there is no standardised “cause”, by the way, let alone “cure” – grilling them as to whether they took pills to help with a migraine or heavy cold?
The simple truth of it is: Trump knows what he’s doing. He’s making “autism” the fall guy for a supposed “win” against decades of sound scientific and medical expertise – because he can. Because he wants to. It ties in perfectly with his continued decimation of public trust in legacy media; with the constant, nonsensical cawing of “fake news” whenever something paints him in a bad light.
Tell the people the world is flat for long enough and they’ll believe it. Tell the people the world is flat but you alone can fix it, and they’ll think you a God.
Just look at who he appointed responsible (unthinkably) for “women’s health”: known vaccine-sceptic RFK Jr; the health secretary who has, almost single-handedly, carved up the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), slashed federal support for vaccination programmes; stopped access to Covid vaccines and abandoned $500m in research into mRNA vaccines.
Under the great con of “Making America Healthy Again”, he has waved through Florida’s plans to lift vaccine mandates for kids, removing essential protections against meningitis, hepatitis B, chickenpox and Hib influenza; sought to remove fluoride from drinking water; touts the benefits of drinking raw milk against government advice; backed a federal ban after an unpleasant U-turn on abortion, saying “every abortion is a tragedy”; and attacked healthcare for transgender youth. And now it is autism’s turn.
It’s not just dangerous – it’s offensive. After reports emerged last year of a case study involving one child taking part in research that then touted leucovorin as some kind of “miracle cure” for autism, the National Autistic Society pointed out that autism “is not a disease or illness, does not have ‘symptoms’ and cannot be ‘reversed’ or ‘cured’… To suggest otherwise is wrong and insulting to more than 700,000 autistic people in the UK,” they added.
Hear, hear. As a parent of a child with ASD, what I can tell you is that there is nothing “wrong” with him at all. He just thinks differently: beautifully, imaginatively, empathetically and creatively. To me, it is a super power. I wouldn’t want him any other way. He is entirely himself – with or without the autism. There’s nothing needing to be “fixed” because he isn’t “broken”. Quite the opposite.
Make no mistake: this latest announcement preventing pregnant women from protecting themselves against simple illnesses – and I spoke to a doctor friend who told me paracetamol “is about as safe as it gets” and is “probably one of the most researched medications out there” – is just another example of the Trump administration’s insidious, calculated and dangerous war on vulnerable people.
Trump’s America isn’t welcoming for women and, now, it isn’t welcoming for people whose brains work just a little bit differently. I’m neurodivergent, and so are my children. We won’t be going to America. It simply isn’t safe.
