Trump admin links autism and Tylenol ingredient use during pregnancy (opens in new tab)

RFK Jr likes to make nice sounding claims about "Gold standard science", but he is probably the worst interpreters of scientific data. He will latch onto any study made by random weirdos so long as they write a interesting abstract. It doesn't matter the sample size or methodology or whatever. Even if the study is retracted or disowned by it's original authors, he will go out of the way to frame opposition as industry bias.

His worldview in turn is actually very simple:

- Initial shocking study with contrarian finding = good and groundbreaking.

- Replication study = cover-up job by industry insiders.

In this way, he is almost the Replication crisis made manifest - if he has his way, he will try to undo nearly all of the studies that have any sort of government funding. And if he pulls on this thread long enough, there is no reason to believe he wouldn't consider all medical research as invalid.

Also on Monday, the FDA approved a lesser-known drug, leucovorin, as a treatment for autism, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said during the briefing.

Obviously they're doing evermore stupid things waiting for someone to say "Naaah!" and then everyone has a laugh and slaps each-other on the back and agrees it was a good joke.

But no-one has.

So, once women stop taking Tylenol during pregnancy, I suppose 5 to 10 years later we'll see autism rates in children drop off. Unlikely.

My mom just texted me “Just thought I’d let you know I did not take Tylenol alcohol or drink coffee during pregnancy”

Somehow I still ended up autistic.

Why they picked something that has extremely compelling evidence to the contrary, rather than just saying "ultraprocessed foods" or older parenting age is beyond me. I don't see how this serves their agenda, and clearly isn't grounded in any facts

At the proclamation, both Trump and Kennedy were the very picture of health and paragons of wellbeing, were they not? And who would doubt the sage medical advice of DJT, who so authoritatively pronounced acetaminophen?

This is way better than I expected.

RFK Jr has long suggested that WiFi and cellular radio may be significant factor in autism (and ADHD, allergies, and obesity). I was expecting then that the big autism announcement would either be that or his old fallback of vaccines.

At least with Tylenol there is (if I correctly understood what I heard about this for the 2-3 minutes I had NPR on while driving to the AM/PM for a snack) there is a correlation between autism and use of Tylenol during pregnancy.

The discussion on NPR, which included a researcher who wrote a paper that the government is basing this on I believe, said that there is no evidence that there is causality here. Nearly everyone in the field thinks that it is far more likely that whatever is causing autism might also increase the likelihood of pain during pregnancy, and so the correlation with Tylenol is simply because those mothers turn to a pain reducing drug and Tylenol is the most commonly recommended drug for that.

Also, Trump managed to get through this without somehow finding a way to directly blame autism on the left/Democrats, so that too is way better than I expected.