President Trump is hardly qualified to dispense medical advice — least of all to women who are pregnant. He once touted an antimalarial drug as a cure for COVID-19 and wondered whether injections of bleach might work.
Now he’s urging expectant mothers to “fight like hell” against taking Tylenol. That seems to spout from the same bottomless fount of ignorance. Or pugnacity, considering he used the same words to incite the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Or mischief. Or another of his diversions. From the Epstein files, perhaps, or from the squelching of a potential bribery case against his border czar, Tom Homan.
Given that so much about Trump is transactional, it’s not unreasonable to wonder also whether there’s an ulterior purpose to the Tylenol stunt.
Unproven accusations
If Kenvue, the Johnson & Johnson spinoff that owns Tylenol, suddenly coughs up millions to finance the administration’s dubious autism study, that would answer the question. Its stock dropped 5% on Monday, accelerating a six-month decline prompted by unproven accusations — now echoed by Trump — that Tylenol causes autism.
Some studies have suggested a relationship. Others haven’t found any. None has actually confirmed Tylenol’s active ingredient as the cause of any behavioral disorder.
There couldn’t be anything more shameful than politicizing such a health condition. Autism now affects one in 31 children, according to the CDC, and it’s a serious concern for every family.
But to say that they are all disabled by it, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims, is an exaggeration.
Many are, but autism is a spectrum behavioral disorder whose symptoms can be barely discernible. Highly successful people — Elon Musk and the climate change activist Greta Thunberg among them — have been diagnosed as autistic.
No scientific evidence has established that acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol and other medications, causes autism. Some studies have reported an association, but it is critical to remember that correlation is not causation.
RFK Jr. and his conflicts
It’s possible that the high fevers for which doctors sometimes prescribe acetaminophen could cause autism in a fetus. If so, the drug would be a coincidence, not a cause.
Questions like that deserve to be pursued by responsible research. However, RFK Jr. is so committed and conflicted on the issue that he should have no part in or influence over any such study.
As a lawyer, Kennedy consulted for the law firm Wisner Baum, which actively solicited plaintiffs who took Tylenol or other medications during pregnancy and bore children later diagnosed with autism. The firm said he was paid only for unrelated cases.
Under Senate pressure, Kennedy divested his stake in cases he had referred to Wisner Baum to another family member. One of his sons, Conor Kennedy, is a lawyer at its Los Angeles office.
In 2023, a federal judge dismissed hundreds of lawsuits alleging that acetaminophen causes autism, and sharply criticized a medical consultant upon whom Trump and Kennedy relied at a recent press conference. Plaintiffs are appealing.
That consultant, Dr. Andrea Baccarelli, now a dean of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, was paid at least $150,000 as an expert witness in the case. But Baccarelli partly walked back the administration’s assertion that he had found a “causal relationship.”
“Further research is needed,” he said in a statement, “to confirm the association and determine causality, but based on existing evidence, I believe that caution about acetaminophen use during pregnancy — especially heavy or prolonged use — is warranted.”
Of course caution is warranted about anything other than food that a woman might consume during pregnancy. Their doctors say that. But the option of medication to alleviate a potentially dangerous illness should remain open to them and their physicians, unhampered by any politician’s interest in exploiting it.
Autism was first described by Dr. Leo Kanner in 1943, 12 years before Tylenol first hit the market in 1955. The medical description has changed over time, making for many more diagnoses.
Many public commentaries point to coincidental reasons for the dramatic increase. One published two years ago by ZA — Arizona Autism United — noted the possibility that children “previously misdiagnosed with intellectual disabilities are now being correctly diagnosed with autism.”
All 50 states now require insurance plans to cover behavioral therapies for autism and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all children between 18 and 24 months old be routinely screened for it.
A second opinion
Since Trump commanded so much attention with his opinions on the subject, we’ll give some to Dr. Steven Fleischman, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Here’s what he said, as quoted by the New York Times:
“We don’t tell people to take a Tylenol a day to help keep their pregnancy healthy. We would only tell people to take if they need it. … What we’re going to continue to tell our patients is that when needed, Tylenol is considered a safe medication to use in pregnancy.
“I think the risk of the fever is higher than any risk that I have seen anywhere related to acetaminophen.”
The risk of taking medical advice from Donald Trump is certainly as high, if not more so.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
