Tylenol and Trump

Should hating Trump override the scientific method and precautionary principle?

I was trying to resist the urge to write about the purported autism-Tylenol connection—announced by the Trump administration with much fanfare yesterday—assuming the topic had already been beaten to death on social media and elsewhere and that everyone would be tired of reading about it by now.

But then this popped into my email inbox and I had traumatic flashbacks to how “The Science™” worked during the COVID years.

It was, as far as I can recall, the only MedScape* article I’d ever received in which the ability to comment had been turned off. *MedScape is an “educational” website for physicians and certain other healthcare professionals. Most of its funding comes from pharmaceutical sponsorship. Commenting is normally limited to registered medical professionals—mostly doctors—and rarely verges into controversy, which is what made the lack of commenting so strange in this case.

The article cited only one study and a few selected “experts” who had concluded that Tylenol in pregnancy was just fine. Heck, these experts opined, it might even be dangerous to stop using it! Pain is bad! Fever is bad! Tylenol is profitable good! The Science™ is settled! Deep into the article, it was acknowledged in passing that “a recent summary analysis of 46 relevant studies found some evidence for a weak association with autism risk and use of acetaminophen.” They neglected to discuss the source of this summary analysis or to interview its authors for comment.

If they had interviewed them, the authors of the summary analysis (from Harvard’s School of Public Health, no less) would no doubt have objected to how their study was characterized. This is what they actually said:

The Harvard researchers—with a grant from Jay Battacharya’s NIH and absent any reported pharmaceutical industry conflicts of interest—used a rigorous systematic review method called the “Navigation Guide” to assess the status of the current research literature. They found that the majority of studies on the topic showed an association between pre-natal acetaminophen exposure and neurodevelopmental disorders (like autism spectrum disorders and ADHD) in offspring, “with higher quality studies more likely to show increased risks and dose-response relationships.”

In their own words:

The purported physiological mechanisms of the Tylenol-Autism link are well explained in this video, if you want to get into the technical nitty gritty:

Medscape’s pharma-funded propaganda notwithstanding, Harvard is not the only “mainstream” institution to urge caution with Tylenol in pregnant women and infants:

That didn’t stop left-wing social media nutters from trying to “own the president” by videoing themselves taking Tylenol while visibly pregnant:

This included the doctor pictured below, who specializes in fertility medicine:

“It will work like a charm,” she says, smiling confidently, “and my baby won’t have autism.”

Is anyone else hearing echoes of “safe and effective”?

(If you have a strong stomach, you can watch the video here: https://x.com/i/status/1970719557733253475)

Other social media denizens insisted that wanting to reduce the incidence of (or find a treatment for) autism was just wrong-headed in the first place:

This guy used the opportunity to “red pill” his wife about the way the mainstream media spins everything related to Trump and RFK:

This guy predicted exactly what would happen before it happened (note the date on the Tweet):

The Babylon Bee, on cue, found the humour in the situation:

And Calley Means pointed out that, once again, Big Pharma is showing us how evil they are. Is anyone else reminded of how, for decades, big tobacco insisted that cigarettes had “not been proven” to cause lung cancer—and attacked anyone who suggested otherwise?

Fun fact. The makers of Tylenol tweeted this back in 2017:

This is the American College of Obstetricians’ statement on the issue from this week:

This is ACOG back in 2013, before they became Trump deranged:

The truth is, nobody yet knows whether acetaminophen and neurodevelopmental disorders are causally linked, or what role other genetic and environmental factors may by playing. That’s how science—real science, not The Science™—works. It’s messy. It’s complicated. It takes years to pin things down definitively. But given what we do know, should we not at least advise caution? How can we not, at a minimum, agree on that much? How did medicine get so corrupt? So unscientific? So political? How did people—journalists, doctors, even mothers—come to hate their political opponents more than they love their own children and grandchildren?

How did half the population—apparently—become so full of hate and arrogance that they have forgotten history?