An Argument in Favor of Competence

“Autism is totally out of control,” Donald Trump told reporters on Friday. “I think we, maybe, have a reason why.” (Röhn, Burns, & Paun, 2025).

The reason why, according to the brain trust hired by the arguably least competent U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary in American history?

Tylenol.

No…we’re not kidding.

One of the most popular analgesic over-the-counter medications is being blamed for the fact that, over 80 years after Dr. Leo Kanner first described a pattern of “abnormal behavior” as ‘early infantile autism” (National Autistic Society, n.d.), our government’s top healthcare agency is now peddling a fantastical story that taking Tylenol during pregnancy is what “can be associated with a very increased risk…” of new autism diagnoses in the United States (Christensen, Dillinger, & Tirrell, 2025). Not surprisingly, this claim is devoid of any facts.

If this pronouncement sounds far-fetched, that’s because the use of acetaminophen—one of the key ingredients in Tylenol—has been repeatedly studied since the release of the drug in 1955, particularly in pregnant women. In fact, there’s nary a substance, appliance, or even fabric that hasn’t been studied over the past century in an effort to identify the root causes of virtually every birth defect, genetic condition, chronic ailment, and neonatal ailment. Tylenol itself—arguably the most common pain reliever in the United States—has repeatedly faced scrutiny due to its ubiquity.

Monday’s disorganized pronouncement was made with either complete unawareness or discounting of findings from a study published just last year in JAMA Network that found no link between the use of acetaminophen and children’s risk of autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or any intellectual disabilities (Ahlqvist et al., 2024).

What made the Ahlqvist study so important is not just that they repeated similar studies conducted since 1955, but did so on a national scale, including a population sample of 2,480,797 children born between 1995-2019 in Sweden, and was done using a full-match sibling control analysis (analyzing results of full siblings with the same parents) to determine if there were differences in outcomes between siblings.

There were not (Figure 1).

Figure 1 - Risk of Diagnosis by Age 10 by Exposure to Acetaminophen

Note: Ahlqvist et al., 2025

Looking at the crude rate across all subjects, Ahlqvist found that virtually no increased risk of children developing autism, ADHD, or an intellectual disability as a result of prenatal exposure to acetaminophen. The study’s authors go so far as to suggest that studies whose design did not utilize sibling controls likely found associations as a result of familial confounding—failing to take into account shared familial risk factors, including genetic factors, which are either difficult or impossible to account for using statistical adjustments (D’Onofrio et al., 2013).

In our current reality, however, none of these studies conducted by many of the world’s best medical scientists mean anything because it’s apparently more important to indulge the conspiracy theories of the least scientifically literate amongst us. Just last week, at a Senate oversight hearing on the mess at HHS, RFK Jr. essentially accused every physician, healthcare professional, and supporter of science of being bought and paid for by Big Pharma (Griffing, 2025).

The current HHS Secretary needs to deflect criticism away from himself because, increasingly, the American public doesn’t trust him (Austin Jr., 2025). According to an analysis by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, “only 39% of Americans have confidence that Kennedy is providing the public with trustworthy information regarding public health, while 60% lack confidence in him (Wappes, 2025).

Kennedy, long a vaccine skeptic, has a history of making both purposely misleading and scientifically false accusations against medical institutions, many of which were through the organization he ran from 2015 to 2023, Children’s Health Defense, which regularly targeted minority communities in attempts to stoke fears of vaccination (Berman, 2024).

Beyond his anti-vaccination screeds, Kennedy has also:

• Posited that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people (Koenig & Shelton, 2023)

• Claimed that HIV didn’t cause AIDS, but party drugs do (Firth, 2024)

• Claimed that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer (Glover, 2024)

• Claimed that 5G damages human DNA, causes cancer, and is being installed in order to carry out mass surveillance (Mostrous, 2020).

More damning, however, is that Kennedy has been given carte blanche to do whatever he wishes with little to no real pushback from Congress, where 52 Senators—all Republican—voted to confirm him.

Since then, Kennedy has embarked on a typically Trumpian campaign of instituting drastic changes to programming, staffing, offices, and services without considering the real-world implications of his actions. Since his inception, he has:

• Laid off thousands of employees across the various HHS agencies (Branswell et al., 2025)

• All but eliminated the communications department at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including those that deal with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests Chen et al., 2025)

• Gutted at least seven minority health offices, eliminating all or almost all of their workers, including directors (Constantino, 2025)

• Attempted to revoke $11 billion in funding for addiction and mental health care (Mann, 2025)

• Demanded that all vaccine studies include placebo controls despite vaccine studies already including placebo controls (Stein, 2025)

• Fired the entirety Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP) and replaced them with hand-selected stooges (Schnirring & Van Beusekom, 2025)

• Demanded the retraction of a Danish vaccine study that demonstrated no link between aluminum in vaccines and autism (Fieldhouse, 2025)

• Fired the recently confirmed CDC director after she refused to fire career scientists or approve any recommendations made by an outside advisory panel with no scientific evidence or adequate science (King, 2025).

Every example of Kennedy’s virtually unrestrained power-wielding has resulted in not just the immediate outcomes—firings, funding cuts, and department shuffling—but in vast immediate and long-term consequences designed not to improve trust in the CDC and HHS (despite claims to the contrary), but to destabilize trust in our public health system to such a degree that it is functionally worthless. Our concern is how these actions will undoubtedly fuel health disparities.

RFK Jr’s repeated statements, actions, and decisions bring us around, again, to the reality that literally no reports, studies, or data released yesterday linking autism to Tylenol can be trusted to be scientifically rigorous, accurate, or reliable.

What we are seeing now is the result of decades of efforts on the part of Kennedy and others in the anti-vax space to rewrite history and dismiss scientific evidence fundamentally. His actions depend on the scientific illiteracy of two generations of adults who have rarely, if ever, experienced the true horrors of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks. We have grown too comfortable believing that measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, smallpox, and other diseases, including polio, just “weren’t really all that bad.”

They were that bad, and anyone who thinks that they weren’t needs to visit one of the handful of countries where lack of access to vaccines has allowed them to remain active and devastate the lives of children and families.

And now, after demanding that scientists prove the link between vaccines and autism and coming up blank, our government has decreed that Tylenol is to blame.

What happened yesterday at The White House could be characterized as health misinformation, at best, and health disinformation, at worst, but either way, the true losers were the American public. To put it bluntly, “Are you gaslighting us?”

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