by Rex Huppke
President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are sentient baseball mitts with opinions. They are very much not doctors.
That didn’t stop them from holding a news conference Sept. 22 to stupidly and irresponsibly pretend that Tylenol causes autism – it does not – and connect lifesaving vaccines to an increase in autism diagnoses, a connection medical science has made clear does not exist.
“I’m not a doctor, but I’m giving my opinion,” Trump said.
Correct, but he blabbed his nonexpert opinion vehemently and repeatedly, creating a false impression that women who take acetaminophen during pregnancy might be responsible if their child is born with autism: “Don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it! Fight like hell not to take it.”
Trump tries to link Tylenol to autism, but science disagrees
This effort to blame mothers for a child’s autism diagnosis and to suggest they tough it out during pregnancy when a fever could be truly harmful to the health of a developing fetus is equal parts sexist and dangerous.
In fact, the entire Trump/Kennedy autism news conference was an insult to science, medicine, mothers and people with autism. It was a pack of shameless male quacks with a history of conspiratorial con artistry trying to pass off vibes-based nonsense as medical advice.
It was a historic embarrassment for America, and it was wildly dangerous because it created a permission structure for people to doubt the proven safety of vaccines. And it planted hesitancy in the minds of pregnant women who will now invariably worry about whether prudent and doctor-recommended use of Tylenol during pregnancy might endanger their child. (It won’t.)
Trump and Kennedy are snake oil salesmen. Listen to your doctor.
“Suggestions that acetaminophen use in pregnancy causes autism are not only highly concerning to clinicians but also irresponsible when considering the harmful and confusing message they send to pregnant patients, including those who may need to rely on this beneficial medicine during pregnancy,” Dr. Steven Fleischman, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement. “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. 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.”
Yeah, that’s very unsettling. And listening to a pair of babbling loons like Trump and Kennedy spouting medical advice to parents is downright horrifying.
Trump rambled about vaccines like a conspiratorial old man with a grudge
Trump flatly declared that childhood vaccines should be broken up so that babies receive fewer doses at a time, making this very expert-sounding and not-at-all-nonsensical statement: “Break it up into four, break it up into three if you have to, but go to the doctor four times instead of once or five times instead of once.”
OK, Grandpa. That makes sense.
He also said of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine: “The MMR I think should be taken separately. This is based on what I feel.”
Health Secretary Kennedy is proving to be as dangerous as expected
Kennedy’s conspiratorial anti-vaccine stance is well known, so it’s no wonder he’s combating science and logic in his role as health secretary. But at the news conference, he also demonstrated his general loathsomeness, coopting a line connected to sexual assault victims and the Me Too movement –
“believe women” – and using it to promote the unfounded views of mothers who are anti-vaxxers.
“Some of our friends like to say we should believe all women,” Kennedy said. “But some of these same people have been silencing and demonizing these mothers for three decades.”
Gross.
It’s as if Trump has a personal dislike of Tylenol
The weirdly anti-Tylenol spectacle – Trump kept repeating “Don’t take Tylenol” over and over in his remarks, as if the medicine had once wronged his family – also included an endorsement for a largely unproven drug to treat autism, leucovorin, a form of vitamin B9.
David Mandell, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and an executive committee member of the Coalition of Autism Scientists, told FactCheck.org that the evidence supporting leucovorin “as a treatment for autism is very weak.”
The evidence supporting everything Trump and Kennedy presented in their news conference is either very weak or nonexistent. Even the authors of the main Harvard/Mount Sinai study that Trump and Kennedy kept citing regarding Tylenol have said their findings don’t mean that Tylenol causes autism.
“We cannot answer the question about causation ‒ that is very important to clarify,” Dr. Diddier Prada, an epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who conducted the study, told The New York Times.
The Trump/Kennedy press conference did nothing but stoke fear
So let me ask this: What good came from the president’s big announcement on autism? It stoked fear about a connection between Tylenol and autism that doesn’t exist. It provided rocket fuel to reckless conspiracies about lifesaving vaccines. It cast blame on mothers and suggested to people with autism that they require some kind of cure.
Above all else, it showed, once again, how spectacularly ignorant and irresponsible our president is. I’ll leave you with this absolutely bizarro-world, non sequitur from Trump: “You have a little child, a little fragile child, and you get a vat of 80 different vaccines, I guess. 80 different blends. And they pump it in. So ideally, a woman won’t take Tylenol.”
Whatever you say, Dr. President. I think I’m going to stick with trusting science over babbling old men.
Author is a USA TODAY columnist
