Trump Slammed for 'Dangerous' Tylenol Advice

"Taking Tylenol is not good," President Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. "I'll say it. It's not good." The president—flanked by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the surgeon general—said that acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, had been linked to autism and that doctors will be advised not to prescribe it to pregnant women, the BBC reports. Tylenol maker Kenvue said it strongly disagree with Trump's remarks. "Sound science clearly shows that taking acetaminophen does not cause autism," the company said.

• Trump didn't offer any new evidence behind the FDA's recommendation, and experts pushed back against his comments, with Dr. Steven Fleischman, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, saying his message was "irresponsible when considering the harmful and confusing message they send to pregnant patients."
• "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," Fleischman said. "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."

• Trump teased the announcement on Sunday, saying, "I think we found an answer to autism." Researchers, however, say that autism appears to be the result of a mix of factors and that there's no simple answer. Some researchers say studies that have found a link to acetaminophen use during pregnancy are flawed. Studies cited in a recent review of research that suggested a link "did not necessarily go to the greatest lengths to account for possible confounders," Dr. Brian Lee, a professor of epidemiology at Drexel University, tells the New York Times. "The biggest elephant in the room here is genetic confounding, because we know autism, ADHD, and other neurodevelopmental disorders are highly heritable," he says.
• Researchers say large studies have found no link and the administration isn't preventing anything new. "The science hasn't changed regardless of what comes out from the report," Lee says, per NBC News. "I'm not sure what the administration is doing, but it looks like they're just going back and reviewing the evidence and they're coming to a different conclusion than many scientists would." Trump said, "We understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it."

• Tylenol has long been considered the only safe over-the-counter choice for pain and fever in pregnant women, CNN notes. The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine warns that untreated fevers can cause miscarriages or birth defects, the AP reports. Trump said Monday that women should try to "tough it out" and "fight like hell" not to take Tylenol.
• Trump also expressed skepticism about the childhood vaccine schedule, the New York Post reports. "You have a little child, little fragile child, and you get a vat of 80 different vaccines, I guess, 80 different blends, and they pump it in," he said. "So ideally, a woman won't take Tylenol, and on the vaccines, it would be good instead of one visit where they pump the baby, you load it up with stuff, you do it over a period of four times or five times." According to the Cleveland Clinic, the childhood vaccine schedule includes 15 different immunizations.
• Arthur Caplan, the founding head of the division of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, tells the Times: "The announcement on autism was the saddest display of a lack of evidence, rumors, recycling old myths, lousy advice, outright lies, and dangerous advice I have ever witnessed by anyone in authority in the world claiming to know anything about science."