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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted on Thursday that the studies he’s cited to justify his baseless and dangerous claims about Tylenol use and autism are “not proof” to back the Trump administration’s guidance — but added that officials are working to retroactively “make the proof.”
During a meeting of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, RFK Jr. listed a few studies that he argued show that autism is linked to Tylenol use during pregnancy, but said they aren’t evidence of his claims.
“This is not dispositive, this is not proof. We are doing the studies to make the proof,” he said.
This remark is further evidence that, as experts have warned, the Trump administration is seeking to effectively dismantle the scientific method in both research and decision making and replace it with conspiracy theories and political gesturing.
“In the meantime, the precautionary principle should apply. Any mother who is taking the stuff during pregnancy just to get back at Donald Trump is doing something that is pathological,” the secretary went on, referring to a TikTok video he talked about earlier in his remarks.
This comment ignores that, in fact, those following the precautionary principle would actually not take critical health advice from a man who says he has no proof.
The secretary later went on to say that “children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, most likely because they are given Tylenol” — shifting the claim to also encompass Tylenol ingestion by babies.
Trump himself has acknowledged that warnings against using acetaminophen, commonly known as Tylenol, during pregnancy did not originate from “doctors” or experts. Yet, the Food and Drug Administration has nevertheless announced that it is undertaking a label change for the drugs to reflect the conspiracy theory.
Medical and public health experts have said that there is no definitive evidence linking Tylenol, or other common medical treatments like vaccines, to autism. Rather, experts have said that it is dangerous to discourage pregnant people from taking acetaminophen, one of the only drugs to treat fever during pregnancy, because there is evidence that prolonged fever has a harmful effect on fetal development.
Experts have warned that the Trump administration and RFK Jr.’s pattern of creating “evidence” for their health claims is completely backwards, and that their prescriptive approach — with what RFK Jr. refers to as “real science” — benefits no one but themselves and their right-wing backers.
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