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autism
Experts ‘Shocked and Appalled’ Over Trump, RFK Jr. Claims on Autism, Tylenol
"Don’t pay any attention whatsoever to what Donald Trump says about medicine," said Britain's top health official.
Sep 23, 2025
Medical experts in the United States and abroad expressed shock Monday at US President Donald Trump's claim that acetaminophen, commonly known by the brand name Tylenol, is linked to autism spectrum disorders in developing fetuses when taken during pregnancy.
Trump made the claim during a press conference with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy where the president at one point made a broad statement about the prevalence of autism before checking to make sure it was correct.
"There are certain groups of people that don't take vaccines and don't take any pills, that have no autism," said the president before asking the health officials assembled at the event, "Is that a correct statement, by the way?"
Kennedy replied that "there are some studies that suggest" there are low autism rates in Amish communities, which tend to have low immunization rates—but do not uniformly shun vaccines or the use of over-the-counter medications.
The debunked myth that autism spectrum disorders do not exist in Amish communities was just one of Trump's claims aimed at linking the use of Tylenol to autism—an effort that left Helen Tager-Flusberg, a psychologist and the founder of the Coalition of Autism Scientists, "shocked and appalled."
"In some respects this was the most unhinged discussion of autism that I have ever listened to," Tager-Flusberg told The New York Times in a discussion with three other experts. "It was clear that none of the presenters knew much about autism—other than the mothers’ lived experience—and nothing about the existing science. This may be the most difficult day in my career."
"To hear from the most powerful office in the world that you should definitely not take paracetamol during pregnancy is alarming and will frighten women."
A central claim presented during the press conference was that the consumption of Tylenol during pregnancy is linked to autism in children—a potential connection that scientists have researched for years with inconclusive results.
Administration officials referred to a recent scientific review from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which did not conduct any new research on birth outcomes but compiled evidence from existing scientific studies of the use of Tylenol during pregnancy.
Andrea Baccarelli, the dean of the Harvard TH Chan School and a co-author of the review, said Monday after the press conference that—as doctors have already long warned—"caution" is warranted regarding the use of Tylenol in pregnancy, especially prolonged or heavy use, but that a causal link to autism has not been proven by the available research.
The president suggested the link has been proven, telling the public: "Don’t take Tylenol [during pregnancy]. Don’t take it. Fight like hell not to take it.”
"Don't take Tylenol!" -- Trump has said this about a dozen times during this press conference pic.twitter.com/eOcEsWXXnu
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 22, 2025
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists affirmed that "in two decades of research on the use of acetaminophen in pregnancy, not a single reputable study has successfully concluded that the use of acetaminophen in any trimester of pregnancy causes neurodevelopmental disorders in children." The group added that fever during pregnancy "can be harmful to pregnant people when left untreated." Acetaminophen is an often-used fever reducer.
Trump and Kennedy also repeated the long-debunked claim that vaccines are linked to autism and said they would commit millions of taxpayer dollars to researching environmental factors, including vaccines.
The experts who spoke to the Times took issue with a central viewpoint presented at the press conference: that the rise in diagnoses of autism spectrum disorders represents a "crisis."
"If anything, the fact we now have increased diagnoses is a reason to celebrate," said Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief for The Independent and the author of We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. "For the longest time, we overlooked autistic people of color and girls. Having data is good. It allows us to ask: 'What do we do with these people? How can we serve them?' Instead, we’re seeing their existence as a crisis."
Epidemiologist Brian K. Lee added that "increased awareness and changing diagnostic criteria" is behind the rise in diagnoses, and Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, noted that Trump incorrectly claimed that "one in 31" children is now diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.
"That’s the prevalence for the full autism spectrum. The prevalence of profound autism is about one in 216," said Singer, who is also the mother of a child with autism.
In the United Kingdom, Health Secretary Wes Streeting was blunt in his assessment of Trump's comments on autism and acetaminophen, which is known in the UK as paracetamol.
"I’ve just got to be really clear about this: There is no evidence to link the use of paracetamol by pregnant women to autism in their children," said Streeting. "I would just say to people watching, don’t pay any attention whatsoever to what Donald Trump says about medicine. In fact, don’t take even take my word for it, as a politician—listen to British doctors, British scientists, the NHS."
Sorcha Eastwood, a member of Parliament from Northern Ireland, added that Trump's unfounded claim was "wrapped in blame towards women and shaming women."
"To hear from the most powerful office in the world that you should definitely not take paracetamol during pregnancy is alarming and will frighten women. To hear that if you take paracetamol during pregnancy that you will give your child autism is completely unfounded and untrue," said Eastwood.
Earlier this year, Kennedy angered disability rights advocates with a proposal, described by National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya, to create a national registry for people with autism. The Health and Human Services Department later walked back Bhattacharya's comments.
But "the language and attitude displayed by Trump and RFK," said Eastwood, displayed "their blatant prejudice towards autism."
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Bobby Kennedy Jr. Makes Eugenics Great Again at Health and Human Services
RFK Jr. has embarked on policies that frighteningly resemble those of eugenicists: They seek to identify and disempower the underprivileged, they serve anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, and they embrace pseudoscience.
May 17, 2025
Charles Fremont Dight has been reincarnated in the worm-gnawed brain of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. A medical professor at the University of Minnesota, Dight hoped to rid society of its unfit members. Dight, an eccentric who lived for a time in a treehouse, wrote about these unfit people in such publications as "Increase of the Unfit, A Social Menace," and "A Proper Function of Society is to Control Reproduction." Like other eugenicists, Dight believed in stronger immigration laws to keep the unfit aliens, but emphatically not people of Anglo-Saxon "stock," out of the country. In 1933, Dight wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler praising the Fuhrer's efforts to "stamp out mental inferiority."
Eugenics, a mainstream science in the early 20th century, sought restrictive marriage laws, isolation of the "unfit" in special colonies for the "feeble minded," and forced sterilization to shield society from the cost of caring for its most vulnerable citizens. Recent immigrants with poor English, children who had what are now recognized as learning disabilities, Down syndrome Americans, and many others were at risk of being paraded before eugenics courts for summary judgment and sent off to isolation colonies. Once removed from society, the eugenicists claimed, those with better bloodlines would be freed of their burden to care for them.
A Registry of Eugenic Discrimination
Bobby Kennedy, Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has embarked on policies that frighteningly resemble those of eugenicists: They seek to identify and disempower the underprivileged, they serve anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, and they embrace pseudoscience. Bobby Jr. wants to identify citizens with autism and place them in some kind of registry. He ordered the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to build "a real-world data platform enabling advanced research across claims data, electronic medical records, and consumer wearables," to determine the root causes of autism spectrum disorder, and to give Bobby and his team of autism falsifiers data drawn from public and private sources in violation of federal privacy and security rules. (Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently signed an executive order to block the federal government from collecting these data related to autism and to protect "dignity, privacy, and the freedom to live without fear of surveillance or discrimination" of Illinois residents.
Bobby's eugenics registry will succeed in stigmatizing people, especially young people, the way that eugenics surveyors stigmatized the "feeble-minded."
The HSS database, like those of the eugenicists, will be subjective and impressionistic. U.S. eugenicists built a registry for the unfit at the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, New York under director Harry Laughlin. Laughlin and his poorly trained minions assembled index cards about American families, often from a cursory glance at a person's face and carriage, to create genetic family trees. The ERO believed they had proved a huge number of people carrying hereditary disease who could be identified to be isolated or sterilized; 80,000 Americans were sterilized.
Racism and Pseudoscience in HHS
Bobby Jr. shares the eccentricities and racism of the eugenists. He cut up whale skull found on the beach near the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, apparently because he likes to study animal skulls and skeletons, tied it to the roof of the family car, and drove it back to New York, while the rank "whale juice" poured into the car and onto his children. Bobby's interest in skulls may have been kindled by the work of craniologist Samuel Morton (1799-1851). In his Crania Americana Morton set forth a hierarchy of intelligence with Native Americans and Blacks at the bottom to justify their enslavement, removal, and other disturbing acts of violence against them.
Building on Morton's thesis, racist scientists and eugenicists documented lack of mental acuity among African Americans. They assigned Blacks special diseases and susceptibilities, one of which, drapetomania, led slaves to run away from cruel owners; another ordained syphilis as a "Negro disease." These racists believed that Blacks have a higher pain tolerance and weaker lungs that could be strengthened through hard labor (slavery). Bobby Jr. claims that Black people have a stronger immune system than white people and thus should receive vaccines on a different schedule. He observed that "to particular antigens, Blacks have a much stronger reaction." Bobby Jr. has said that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS, and he reiterates the fiction that HIV does not cause AIDS.
Another leg in the eugenicists' program was anti-immigration laws. ERO director Laughlin testified before the U.S. Congress in support of the Immigration Act of 1924 and its restrictions on admission to the U.S. of "races" considered inferior to the Anglo stock. On the basis of flawed data, Laughlin told Congress that recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were "socially inadequate," and tended to "degeneracy, shiftlessness, alcoholism, and insubordination," all of which were supposedly genetic traits. The 1924 act was easily passed signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge who believed that "America must be kept American" and that "biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races."
No wonder Donald Trump selected Bobby Jr. to head HHS. Trump began his first presidential campaign commenting with conviction that Mexican immigrants were drug dealers and rapists. Trump draws on the work of criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and the racial hygienists of Nazi Germany where a person's genes or bloodline determine his or her capacity for success or violence. Trump said, "You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes." But the Trump family has good genes, although his convictions for sex and financial crimes might offer counter evidence: "We're smart people… We're like racehorses." During his ongoing campaign against undocumented aliens and citizens with foreign-sounding names, Trump ordered white South Africans to be given asylum in the U.S., but pointedly not Afghans who fought for freedom against the Taliban, Mexicans, or any other "races."
The Pseudoscience of Mercury-Caused Autism
The entire premise of Bobby's registry is the fully discredited assertion that vaccinations cause autism which is based on a retracted and discredited 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. Wakefield combed his data, weeded out some children who didn't fit, and carefully included others. Further, his research was funded by lawyers acting for parents who were involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
Like Dight, Laughlin, and other eugenicists, Bobby lies and misinterprets data to fit his predetermined and erroneous conclusions that vaccines cause autism. In one article Bobby "claimed that the amount of ethyl mercury in vaccines was 187 times greater than the recommended limit, when it was only 1.4 times greater." He cited one study to contend that tuna sandwiches laced with mercury being fed to two-month-old babies. There is nothing of the sort in the study.
Eugenics and the Decline of Public Health
Bobby's strange mix of false science will exacerbate such public health crises as the ongoing measles epidemic as confused parents deny their children life-saving vaccinations. Bobby Jr. hates vaccines. He referred to the Covid-19 vaccine as "the deadliest vaccine ever made." The vaccine saved perhaps as many as 20 million lives. Kennedy has said that he only drinks raw milk. Doing so puts people at risk of foodborne illness, since pasteurization kills off pathogens. Drinking it may increase the risk of the spread of bird flu. Bobby wants to remove fluoride from drinking water and claims bone cancer, IQ loss, thyroid disease, and other things may result from its use. This is untrue. Fluoride prevents cavities.
Kennedy's fabrications about autism, mercury, and other topics recall the misguided work of eugenicist Henry Goddard. Goodard was the director of research at New Jersey's Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys. He opened an early clinical laboratory to study intellectual disabilities. Tracing the lineage of one of his young patients and building her family tree back to the Revolutionary War, Goddard concluded that intelligence, sanity, and morality were hereditary, and every effort should be undertaken to keep the "feeble-minded" from procreating to eliminate them from the breeding pool. His study on the "Kallikaks" (1912) used touched-up photos to show the Kallikaks as inferior creatures.
Always lurking in the minds of this MAGA government are racist scientific ideas about breeding and innate intelligence; about the evils of immigrants; and about the need to revitalize science away from rigorous hypothesis and testing toward conspiracy, pseudoscience, and eugenics. Bobby's eugenics registry will succeed in stigmatizing people, especially young people, the way that eugenics surveyors stigmatized the "feeble-minded." Perhaps the registry will confirm what is well known: that increasing numbers of people identified with autism is largely to do with increased screening for and greater identification of people with autism. There is no epidemic. But, like a good eugenicist, he has determined his conclusions before the study begins.
Happy measles, everyone! Or, as Donald Trump says, he only hires the best people.
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Disability Advocates, Civil Rights Groups Sound Alarm on RFK's Reported Autism 'Registry'
Advocates still have concerns about Trump administration officials' efforts to study autism, even after the Health and Human Services Department said there will be no autism registry.
May 13, 2025
Dozens of public health, disability rights, and civil rights groups on Monday raised "significant concerns" about a walked-back proposal from the National Institutes of Health—an entity within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—to create a national autism registry.
Their concern stems from April comments first reported by CBS News from NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who said during a meeting that NIH intends to create national disease registries, including one for autism. However, HHS later said it is not creating a national registry for people with autism, walking back Bhattacharya's comments.
However, NIH is moving forward with creating a "real-world data platform," which Bhattacharya also discussed during that meeting. The platform will partner with federal health insurance programs and use information from Medicare and Medicaid in order to determine the "root causes" of autism, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Kennedy has drawn pushback for his comments about autism in the past, including when he recently cast autism as a "tragedy" and an epidemic that "destroys families."
In a Monday letter addressed to Kennedy, the groups argue that even though HHS has said it is not creating such a registry, "the larger platform's unclear purpose and potential for abuse necessitates that HHS and NIH engage with disability and civil rights advocates and implement fundamental safeguards."
According to New York Times reporting on the database, it "is not clear precisely what kind of research will be conducted."
David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry and longtime autism researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Times it's "the registry without the word 'registry' in it."
"We are creating a tool, and tools can be used for good and for evil," he also said. "I know a lot of researchers—and I like to think of myself as one—who have used this kind of tool for good. And I'm really concerned that that's not what happens."
According to the letter, lack of clarity around what NIH specifically plans to do has led to "immense concern" among autistic people, their families, researchers, and privacy advocates.
"HHS and NIH's failure to engage with autistic people and autistic advocates has exacerbated this lack of clarity," the letter alleges.
Letter signatories include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), and the Autism Society of America.
The groups outline three steps they say NIH and HHS can take to help establish trust around its proposed platform: "Meaningful communication with autistic people and advocates; fundamental privacy safeguards to prevent misuse and abuse; and ensuring the data platform advances the well-being of autistic people, people with disabilities, and the public health while minimizing potential harms."
The groups wrote that some data collection can enable better understanding of how to meet the needs of people with disabilities, but "disabled people in the United States have a long and troubled history with governmental efforts to find and track disability for the purpose of eliminating it."
"It's no secret that this proposal has created a lot of fear and confusion in the autistic community," said Colin Killick, executive director of ASAN, in a statement on Monday. "We continue to advocate and support research into autism that autistic people want conducted, but it is critical that autistic people's private data not be shared without our consent. We hope the administration answers our questions to shine light on how autistic people and our rights will be protected."
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