Several weeks ago, we learned of Robert Kennedy Jr’s plans to “link” pregnant women’s Tylenol use with autism. On Monday, Kennedy and Donald Trump went through with it, holding a press conference in which Trump could not even pronounce “acetaminophen.” Trump also admitted that he had no idea what the f–k he was talking about.
President Donald Trump announced Monday that the US Food and Drug Administration will notify doctors that the use of Tylenol during pregnancy can be associated with a “very increased risk of autism,” despite decades of evidence that it is safe.
“They are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary,” such as to treat fever, “if you can’t tough it out,” Trump said.
Experts say there are multiple causes of autism, and the science showing a connection between autism and Tylenol is not settled. Without treatment, a fever can be dangerous for both the fetus and the pregnant person, experts say. Risks include miscarriage, birth defects and high blood pressure.
At some point during pregnancy, most people use acetaminophen, sold under the brand name Tylenol, studies show. Acetaminophen is considered the only safe over-the-counter option for pain or fever for pregnant people. Other common pain relief options like ibuprofen or regular-dose aspirin can increase the risk of serious complications during pregnancy.
Speaking from the White House alongside US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, US National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump did not keep his remarks to Tylenol during pregnancy. He advocated for breaking up childhood vaccinations and even pushing back the hepatitis B shot for newborns — a public health strategy that brought the infection in children to the brink of elimination — to age 12.
It’s “too much liquid, too many different things are going into that baby,” Trump said, without providing further evidence.
Extensive research has shown that there’s no link between vaccines and autism.
I’m not the first one to note this, but it’s an important observation to make: Robert Kennedy Jr’s obsession with autism feels very much like an autistic person’s hyperfixation. In truth, I don’t believe that Kennedy is actually autistic, I think he’s just a con man. Meanwhile, one consistent thread through credible research into autism is that one of the biggest factors is the father’s age. The older the father, the higher the likelihood of a child’s autism. Again, there is no credible evidence that Tylenol is harmful for pregnant women or that Tylenol usage leads to autism.
Tylenol-maker Kenvue saw their stock bounce today in the European markets. On Monday, they shared this statement in response to Trump & Kennedy’s unhinged announcement: “Acetaminophen is the safest pain reliever option for pregnant women as needed throughout their entire pregnancy” and that “rigorous research, endorsed by leading medical professionals and global health regulators, confirms there is no credible evidence linking acetaminophen to autism. We believe independent, sound science clearly shows that taking acetaminophen does not cause autism. We strongly disagree with any suggestion otherwise and are deeply concerned with the health risk this poses for expecting mothers.” I genuinely hope Kenvue sues the everloving f–k out of Trump, Kennedy and the entire United States government.
Trump: "Asceda — well, let's see how we say that. Ascenem — enophin. Acetaminophen. Is that okay?" pic.twitter.com/EVp7IGSksk
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 22, 2025
Trump: With Tylenol, don't take it. Don't take it. And if you can't live, if your fever is so bad, you have to take one because there's no alternative to that, sadly. First question, what can you take instead? Actually, there's not an alternative to that
As you know, other of… pic.twitter.com/UeSiSO7RUk
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 22, 2025
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
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- United States President Donald Trump makes an announcement about a link between acetaminophen and autism in the Roosevelt Room of the White House Featuring: President Donald Trump, Robert F Kennedy Jr Where: Washington, District of Columbia, United States When: 22 Sep 2025 Credit: Francis Chung/POOL via CNP/INSTARimages.com
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- United States President Donald Trump makes an announcement about a link between acetaminophen and autism in the Roosevelt Room of the White House Featuring: President Donald Trump, Robert F Kennedy Jr Where: Washington, District of Columbia, United States When: 22 Sep 2025 Credit: Francis Chung/POOL via CNP/INSTARimages.com
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- United States President Donald Trump makes an announcement about a link between acetaminophen and autism in the Roosevelt Room of the White House Featuring: President Donald Trump, Robert F Kennedy Jr Where: Washington, District of Columbia, United States When: 22 Sep 2025 Credit: Francis Chung/POOL via CNP/INSTARimages.com
Yes, yes. When in doubt, blame women.
Yeah, why don’t they just tough it out. He would love to see women suffer, that will show them.
While I agree, the grand strategy stretches far beyond women. The whole MAHA movement is built to delegitimize science itself — pushing the idea that every health outcome is just a matter of personal willpower. Eat organic greens! Go running! Skip vaccines! Shun medicine! And above all: never trust the “evil doctors.”
Why? Because if Americans can be convinced that the healthcare industry is corrupt and ineffectual, they’ll stop seeing access to healthcare as a collective right.
That’s the point. The Trump administration and its tech-oligarch backers have no plan to expand quality, affordable care — so instead, they’re trying to vilify the very system they refuse to fix.
This right here 👆.
That part.👏🏼👏🏼
There’s a decades-long history of blaming the mother for autism. It stretches back at least to the 1950s. Then, doctors told these mothers their cold indifference was the cause. Hearing that you, the mother, are responsible for- even if you know it’s untrue – takes its toll.
Gee,wonder why the birth rate is so low…🤔 every day they do what they can to put pregnant women in danger.
This is wild crackpot stuff from the anti-vax conspiracy theories fringe.
The tragedy is that it will do real harm, to pregnant women who will be scared to take pain relief, and to autistic children and their families who will be denied support and blamed for causing their child’s autism by making bad choices.
Autism has a strong genetic component. Autistic children often have autistic parents or grandparents. It can’t be cured or avoided because it’s not an illness. And this push to say that it can be is a dangerous lie.
The company that makes tylenol has grounds to sue the hell out of them.
My daughter was diagnosed with autism level 1 this summer but in our family we know that I’m far more obviously autistic than she. Then my husband’s sister (a therapist) said she always thought he was autistic.
We certainly all have strong pathological demand avoidance profiles.!
In any case I pondered my grandfather who could identify planes by the sound their engines make, who read the complete works of Shakespeare as a high school dropout and who took up oil painting for a while.
Autistic? Yes I think so. I find this couching of autism as something to be eradicated very sad and very dangerous.
Easing the day to day challenges for autistic people is essential. Wanting to cure us of our very nature is problematic.
Yes. Exactly this.
I’m not diagnosed but I strongly suspect I’m autistic, and I think of my father in his garage cleaning all the cars inside and out until they were just so, and polishing all our shoes then lining them up in the hallway, and feel that I probably inherited it from him. I’m dismayed by the current efforts to explain away autism and paint it as something terrible.
Wow they really hate women don’t they?
They’re not going to rest until we’re barred from education, married at 13 and living in a shed with no medical support as we produce endless babies.
The taliban are making girls attend religious schools in return for families accessing aid, I can only assume the US is paying attention.
Sorry idiots, autism has been around a lot longer then Tylenol. Talk about failing up with these guys.
I stopped by to say this. Also, MAGA Christians say that today was the rapture, and yet, here we are! You cannot make this up, and it’s sad what this country has become to in such a short time!
I especially like in the bottom clip from Aaron Rupar, when Trump is basically saying sorry, pregnant ladies, you can’t take Tylenol, but there’s nothing else you can take either, he points out that all the other alternatives “have been proven bad. Right? They’ve actually been proven bad.”
Way to – yet again – say the quiet part out loud: that none of this BS with Tylenol has in any way been proven, but go ahead and demonize so pregnant folks end up taking the stuff that has actually been PROVEN bad, bc you just want to make s*(t up here.
(Why do I also suspect that if the makers of Tylenol were willing to donate big bucks to Trump they would reverse their stance?)
My husband was born in the 50s and his mother never took paracetamol (which I think was invented in the 50s even though autism was forever). Anyway, my husband is autistic. I just feel it’s important to say that autism isn’t some terrible disability. It’s often a super power. I loathe the characterisation that it’s a bizarre disability. That’s so awful. I have adhd, he is way on the spectrum. We both contribute endlessly to the community. It’s painful to be treated this way
People with autism are people. They don’t need to be fixed.
Highly megalomaniac men always need to blame someone or something else for everything less than perfect in their spheres. If the whispers I hear from my DC insider friends are true (and they are), Barron is very much on the spectrum. I suspect that one of Bobby Jr.’s boys is as well, and his anti-vax campaign began when his and his late wife’s children were toddlers, i.e., diagnosis age.
Regardless, it can’t be the man’s fault, so they search to find a way to blame the “imperfection” on external forces or the mother, as there could be no internal imperfection in “MY” genetic line. I’ve known of men demanding paternity tests on toddlers who look just like them, simply because the babies’ are diagnosed as less than perfect. It’s a male ego problem.
If there’s a link between autism and the father’s age, Trump would never admit that. I believe he was almost sixty when Barron was born.
My first thought was of Barron, too. If Barron ever wondered what his father thinks of him, I’m guessing he has his answer now.
Or he could just look to his father’s dismissive treatment of all of his kids, save for the eldest daughter. He’s a mama’s boy in any case, and I suspect he’s as distant from his father as the rest of them. However, I don’t see him ever kowtowing to the creep, as his mother is now the one with the money. If T survives until the mid-terms (providing we have them), he will be a lame duck, and eventually, if there is a reckoning, his family’s money will be frozen for years during all the hearings, etc. (Melania has separated all of her finances from him). Well, that’s IF there is ever an actual reckoning, and not Nixon 2.0 with the next POTUS pardoning that family.
That’s what I’d always heard as well. But I wouldn’t characterize him as a “mama’s boy,” it’s just that Melania is the one who parented him, not Trump. There’s a reason she lives in NY and he goes to college in NY. Not a Melania fan (jacket, Xmas displays, non-involvement), but that’s what it looks like to me.
Daisychain, you’re right about the term “mama’s boy,” as it is typically designated for a “type” of grown man. To clarify, he spent all of his time with his mother and maternal grandparents. Ivana wrote in her memoir that T had nothing to do with the children until they were mid to late teens, when he could talk business with them and they were old enough to understand. He brags about having never changed a diaper, and has been clear that children are the responsibility of mothers, not fathers. Not being raised to suck up to his father, like the older three, will serve him better as it has for Tiffany.
@Alice there’s an old story from Joe Scarborough (ugh) about meeting at least Don Jr and Ivanka at some sort of event – well before 2015/2016 – and he mentioned to Donald Trump how polite and well mannered and nice they seemed and he said something like “that’s all their mother, I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
(and i know its vomit inducing now to think of Don Jr and Ivanka that way but interesting that even then he admitted he wasnt involved.)
“his family’s money will be frozen for years during all the hearings, etc.”
Dare we dream?
@Becks1-it kinda doesn’t surprise me that the Trump kids would be polite and have decent social skills. I feel like a lot of rich kids are like that–they learn at a young age to present well to the public. They have that specific pedigree, even if they are morally bereft and without any true character. It’s all just aesthetics.
🎯💯
Any person who decides to follow the “guidance” coming out of this administration does it at their own peril.
Gee, can’t wait until 10 years from now when pregnant women have completely stopped taking Tylenol and no children have been diagnosed with autism for a decade… not.
I wonder what genetic disease will be blamed on safe OTC medication next. These people are setting us back decades. I expect polio to come back at this rate.
Sick, exhausted people are easier to control. Particularly when they have accumulated mountains of medical debt. I think that’s the point…
This is about blaming women for having children with autism and an attempt to control their bodies.
There’s already been a lawsuit in federal court over the Tylenol autism nonsense. It was dismissed, of course, due to lack of credible evidence from experts. An appeal is pending.
My husband, a family doctor, walked in the house last night and said, “I need a drink!” And he’s never gotten home from work and said that to me in 10 years of marriage.
While there is some slight correlation between Tylenol use during pregnancy and autism, if you control for genetics that correlation goes away. And that makes sense to me: autistic children are more likely to be born to an autistic parent, and autistic women may be more likely to need to take Tylenol during pregnancy due to a more sensitive nervous system. So even if there was a correlation that wouldn’t mean causation; it could just mean that people more likely to take Tylenol also happen to be more likely to have autistic children.
The agenda, as always: blame women, blame mothers, question science.
I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like for my awesome, thriving, smart and thoughtful students to keep hearing how Autism is worse than miscarriage/death.
”Ya hear that, wimmen? You’re nothing but vessels. I don’t care if you’re miserable, you’re not a person, you’re a portal for future men to come onto the planet, so just be miserable because if there’s anything wrong with the kid, it’s your fault.”
That’s essentially what they’re saying. Their misogyny is, I would argue, even greater than their racism, and that’s saying something (but I’m aware that they’d for sure hunt Black women down for taking Tylenol in a way they wouldn’t hunt down White women cause they sure do enjoy their -isms).
My brother’s eldest child is autistic. My brother was 25 years old when my niece was born. So, advanced age was not a factor there.
My husband’s brother’s eldest daughter is also autistic. He was 23 years old when she was born.
I listened to more of the thing yesterday than I would have liked and it was just fascinating how he had no idea what he was talking about and whenever he went off script he just rambled and kept saying he didnt know. Someone asked about the ACOG statement that tylenol was safe and he said something about the establishment and then said “well maybe they’re right though, I don’t know.”
IF THEY’RE RIGHT AND TYLENOL IS SAFE THEN WHAT IS THIS SHITSHOW ABOUT!?!!??!
Mount Sinai recently published something like a meta analysis (but different) saying there is a slight risk. I need someone who has more knowledge than me to explain that. I have always thought it was genetic.
Emily Oster explains this really well in her IG stories. @profemilyoster is her IG handle. I highly recommend watching.
He’s a moron who cannot pronounce even normal everyday words.
Just shake off that fever ladies!
I meant to add that it’s worth just listening to the shit he was saying without the distraction of the visual aspect. It really highlights the dangerous combination of stupidity and dementia.
Does anyone else find it odd that the POTUS is even making this statement, regardless of its veracity?
May these men who all seem to know how women should “ tough it out” all be plagued with giant kidney stones and have to “ tough it out” passing them the natural way.
Dr.0z is a major investor in iHerb, which sells the folinic acid supplement RFK Jr. and Trump claim can “treat” autism. How convenient and not corrupt at all.
There’s a great new Science Vs podcast episode on this topic that explains the studies that led to this idea, and how they are flawed, if you want to take a slightly deeper and very informative dive into it – and I appreciate that they also honor how complex scientific research and conclusions can be. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/309-science-vs-28030162/