Trump Admin Links Autism and Tylenol Ingredient Use During Pregnancy

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

hmm37

36 points

43 comments

cnbc.comResearchstory

skepticalnegative

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AutismTylenolAcetaminophenPregnancy

Key topics

Autism

Tylenol

Acetaminophen

Pregnancy

The Trump administration linked autism to Tylenol ingredient use during pregnancy, sparking controversy and skepticism among commenters who questioned the evidence and motivations behind the claim.

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Discussion (43 comments)

Showing 43 comments

hmm37Author

3 months ago

2 replies

Also on Monday, the FDA approved a lesser-known drug, leucovorin, as a treatment for autism, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said during the briefing.

bmau5

3 months ago

2 replies

which is the folinic acid, an active form of folate

rolph

3 months ago

in other words, vitamin B9

ggm

3 months ago

Folate in pregnancy has been a thing forever. Folate reinforced foods, commonplace. Precisely because of neural tube development in pregnancy. I would add, across the period of time diagnosis of autism has risen, folate supplementation has been commonplace.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4933077/ for example.

I'm not an epidemiologist. I prefer advice on things to come with epidemiologists backing. I'm not getting a vibe if that's happening this news cycle.

moogly

3 months ago

1 reply

Also a peddler of supplements. Does he sell folinic acid perhaps?

ncallaway

3 months ago

Dr. Oz held a significant investment in iHerb. iHerb does sell folinic acid: https://www.iherb.com/pr/california-gold-nutrition-folinic-a...

bmau5

3 months ago

5 replies

Why they picked something that has extremely compelling evidence to the contrary, rather than just saying "ultraprocessed foods" or older parenting age is beyond me. I don't see how this serves their agenda, and clearly isn't grounded in any facts

moogly

3 months ago

1 reply

Don't underestimate these horrid men's wish to control women and their bodies. "Tough it out", was this clown's words.

bmau5

3 months ago

2 replies

I hear you. I just have a hard time believing he does anything without some direct tie back to his bank account. If we find he has short positions in Kenvue it'll make more sense to me.

xp84

3 months ago

1 reply

That would certainly fit the pattern we've seen. I'm always floored by how small the grifts are. Like, if I were a 'morally flexible' President and had at least a billion dollars already, I sure wouldn't consider being influenced by 9 figures or less. Come talk to me when it's going to enrich my 'team' by at least 10 billion. For anything less than that I'd be determined to appear straight as an arrow. For Trump you can approve a new golf course for him and he'll just executive order whatever you want.

anigbrowl

3 months ago

For one thing, he knows he's more or less untouchable legally and politically. The American establishment no longer has the will to police itself properly due to institutional capture.

For another, directe enrichment isn't the only incentive for corruption. It also corrupts the giver, and having control over lots of small and medium people who are already corrupted is worth more than the up front cash value.

moogly

3 months ago

Oh, you'll be hearing from now on that he saved America from the scourge of autism, something no other president has ever managed to do, and certainly not Obama or Biden because they were horrible, just horrible, presidents. Just like he stopped 7 wars, but really, it was 10 wars, and they were horrible wars, and he saved mill-yins and mill-yins of lives. Just tremendous work, he'll have you know.

al_borland

3 months ago

2 replies

Hopefully people are watching to make sure none of them shorted the stock.

xp84

3 months ago

1 reply

~I thought J&J already settled a big class-action lawsuit on that, didn't they?~

Edit: I was misremembering an ongoing lawsuit as having been resolved: https://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/MDL/22md3043

al_borland

3 months ago

1 reply

Apparently J&J spun off their consumer health products, including Tylenol to Kenvue in 2023.

xp84

3 months ago

I didn't realize at first that the spin-off would be the ones who retain the legal liability but I suppose it makes sense with it being split off from the original company (which makes more sense than if Tylenol was sold to a third party).

rsynnott

3 months ago

1 reply

What stock? Paracetamol was first synthesised over 150 years ago; it is the most generic of generic drugs. It's also, well, not a big profit centre for anyone; it costs practically nothing.

al_borland

3 months ago

Kenvue. J&J spun off their consumer products, including Tylenol, into Kenvue a couple years ago. It dropped 7.5% on the news to an all-time low.

bediger4000

3 months ago

1 reply

It looks like maybe the agenda is to make autism the parents' fault. Then those elite, genetically superior upper crust folks can demand that morally inferior parents who damaged their children take on the burden of supporting, and maybe hiding, their mutant offspring.

As an additional bonus, the diagnosis of autism becomes a moral fault of the parents, something to be avoided if possible, hidden if not. Another lever to use on people, like being gay was up to the 1980s, or having African American ancestry was until the 1970s.

ModernMech

3 months ago

Not the parents’, specifically the mother’s fault.

kccoder

3 months ago

2 replies

They don't care about facts. At this point I think it is fair to say they don't understand what a fact is. They prefer "alternative facts", which is another way of saying they will claim, without evidence, or even with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that anything which aligns with their feelings or beliefs, or serves their purposes, is a fact, reality be damned.

ModernMech

3 months ago

Trump, today: "The MMR I think should be taken separately. This is based on what I feel."

Medical advice broadcast to the nation based on Trump’s feelings.

olooney

3 months ago

"You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit the views." - Dr. Who

anigbrowl

3 months ago

Compelling evidence guarantees opposition from rationally inclined people. Opposition serves as 'negative proof' to the conspiratorially minded, and causes them to circle the wagons in defense of their leaders. Trump gets loyalty and probably money while posturing that he's 'standing up to big pharma'.

legitster

3 months ago

2 replies

RFK Jr likes to make nice sounding claims about "Gold standard science", but he is probably the worst interpreters of scientific data. He will latch onto any study made by random weirdos so long as they write a interesting abstract. It doesn't matter the sample size or methodology or whatever. Even if the study is retracted or disowned by it's original authors, he will go out of the way to frame opposition as industry bias.

His worldview in turn is actually very simple:

- Initial shocking study with contrarian finding = good and groundbreaking.

- Replication study = cover-up job by industry insiders.

In this way, he is almost the Replication crisis made manifest - if he has his way, he will try to undo nearly all of the studies that have any sort of government funding. And if he pulls on this thread long enough, there is no reason to believe he wouldn't consider all medical research as invalid.

jacquesm

3 months ago

1 reply

It makes you wonder if he would refuse science if it could save his life.

jimt1234

3 months ago

The ghost of Herman Cain has entered the chat.

JohnFen

3 months ago

> He will latch onto any study made by random weirdos so long as they write a interesting abstract.

Well, not any study. He'll latch on to the ones that support the things he wants to be true.

tzs

3 months ago

5 replies

This is way better than I expected.

RFK Jr has long suggested that WiFi and cellular radio may be significant factor in autism (and ADHD, allergies, and obesity). I was expecting then that the big autism announcement would either be that or his old fallback of vaccines.

At least with Tylenol there is (if I correctly understood what I heard about this for the 2-3 minutes I had NPR on while driving to the AM/PM for a snack) there is a correlation between autism and use of Tylenol during pregnancy.

The discussion on NPR, which included a researcher who wrote a paper that the government is basing this on I believe, said that there is no evidence that there is causality here. Nearly everyone in the field thinks that it is far more likely that whatever is causing autism might also increase the likelihood of pain during pregnancy, and so the correlation with Tylenol is simply because those mothers turn to a pain reducing drug and Tylenol is the most commonly recommended drug for that.

Also, Trump managed to get through this without somehow finding a way to directly blame autism on the left/Democrats, so that too is way better than I expected.

barbacoa

3 months ago

1 reply

There is also no direct evidence that smoking causes lung cancer. There are no randomized controlled trials to establishing smoking is the cause. Nor could we ever feasibly run one. All we know is there is very strongly correlation.

tzs

3 months ago

You've overlooked animal studies. There are numerous direct studies with animals exposed to cigarette smoke or even taught to smoke that have shown more than just correlation.

You've also overlooked that we can see what chemicals smoking exposes lung cells to, and we can expose cultured lung cells in the lab to those chemicals and see that they are carcinogenic.

UncleMeat

3 months ago

1 reply

Trump is going on TV and saying that they don't have autism in cuba because they are too poor to afford tylenol and that we shouldn't have mmr vaccines because there is "too much liquid" in them. It is a clown show.

ModernMech

3 months ago

Clown shows are at least wholesome entertainment. This is a travesty in the fullest meaning of that word.

zimpenfish

3 months ago

> there is a correlation between autism and use of Tylenol during pregnancy.

[0] (via [1]) says no - "analyses of matched full sibling pairs found no evidence of increased risk of autism (hazard ratio, 0.98), ADHD (hazard ratio, 0.98), or intellectual disability (hazard ratio, 1.01) associated with acetaminophen use [...] a population-based sample of 2 480 797 children"

[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2817406

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/study-reveals-...

TomK32

3 months ago

Not sure why you got downvotes for sarcasm.

Russ Barkley did a video three weeks ago on I guess that study (or meta study) and it's not just the likely increased pain in mothers with ADHS but as soon as you take in a control group like siblings the correlation just vanishes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJGn4j6QTiw

joquarky

3 months ago

Doesn't autism tend to cause increased sensitivity?

And if autism is genetic, then the mother might also be more sensitive and request pain relief.

ModernMech

3 months ago

1 reply

My mom just texted me “Just thought I’d let you know I did not take Tylenol alcohol or drink coffee during pregnancy”

Somehow I still ended up autistic.

OutOfHere

3 months ago

1 reply

Did she take any other neurological medicines during pregnancy (more than just once or twice)?

I don't think drinking coffee is an issue.

ModernMech

3 months ago

No. FWIW the male line on my father's side is mostly autistic. Me, my dad, my grandfather, and one of my 3 uncles. So it's not anything my mom did.

jimt1234

3 months ago

1 reply

So, once women stop taking Tylenol during pregnancy, I suppose 5 to 10 years later we'll see autism rates in children drop off. Unlikely.

lawn

3 months ago

They'll just stop diagnosing autism and celebrate the low rates.

jjgreen

3 months ago

Obviously they're doing evermore stupid things waiting for someone to say "Naaah!" and then everyone has a laugh and slaps each-other on the back and agrees it was a good joke.

But no-one has.

treetalker

3 months ago

At the proclamation, both Trump and Kennedy were the very picture of health and paragons of wellbeing, were they not? And who would doubt the sage medical advice of DJT, who so authoritatively pronounced acetaminophen?

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