Donald Trump is practicing medicine without a license in declaring that pregnant women should not take acetaminophen (brand name Tylenol) because it will cause autism in their children. He went even further than his crank Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the HHS doctors who stood with them in the Roosevelt Room on Monday.
Trump repeated again and again and again his advice to pregnant women, falsely asserting that there was clear evidence that the over the counter drug led to autism, mostly based on one inconclusive Harvard study, going much further than the already-extreme Food and Drug Administration guidance on the matter.
There are good reasons why U.S. presidents have historically been very, very careful about what they speak on and how they choose to speak on it. It’s not just that they have enormous authority over the world’s most prominent bureaucracies, militaries, and diplomatic apparatuses, but they also have the most prominent of all bully pulpits. Indeed, Trump stood before the Rough Rider painting of the originator of that term, Teddy Roosevelt, the only other native of New York City to become president.
In the wake of Trump‘s irresponsible announcement, we saw not only researchers and medical experts object but international authorities, including the World Health Organization, because the office of the U.S. presidency still carries rhetorical weight around the globe.
It is almost tedious at this point to have to point out Trump and his administration’s routine fabrications, but for the record, the link that he is so laying out does not, per the available evidence, exist. This is the same public health administration that made the same category error — or, more likely, intentional misrepresentation — when it came to fluoridation of the water.
Obviously, any substance in high enough concentrations and taken routinely enough can have health implications. If an expectant mother decided to eat 20 bananas a day for the duration of pregnancy, it’s possible that this would have some kind of impact on her child. Ditto tomatoes, Tic Tacs, antacids, whatever. That does not mean that those substances are inherently dangerous, or that it makes any sense whatsoever to warn people off of them, especially given that in this case acetaminophen is the only pain and fever relieving drug that some people can safely take at all.
Undergirding this reckless announcement is RFK‘s broader obsession with attempting to find some kind of environmental trigger for autism, which is a theory that none of the available evidence so far has come close to substantiating. While diagnoses have been rising in recent decades, part of that is almost certainly due to improved diagnostic criteria and monitoring.
Perhaps there are a mix of genetic and environmental factors, perhaps it is purely genetic, perhaps there really is some sort of acute environmental trigger, but the health secretary is apparently disinterested in these open questions and complexities and fixated on finding what he thinks are clear external causes. That’s unsurprising given that the false belief that medical therapeutics cause autism is core to the anti-vaccine movement that he championed for so long.
This advances the dangerous presumption that autism is just a disease to be solved, and that autistic children or their parents are somehow responsible for their condition. It’s certainly worth our public health institutions studying autism, as they would any other physical or mental health condition.
How about instead of his odious quest, RFK should be focusing on a COVID spike, or the return of measles, but that would mean accepting that he’s wrong
