We all recall the days during the Covid pandemic in 2020 when Trump would hold press conferences where he would promote whatever the latest crackpot idea that he heard about to treat Covid, such as injecting disinfectant or hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine or ultraviolet light or the animal dewormer Ivormectin. And since as president he commanded much media attention, a lot of people listened to him.

It looks like we are back to those days, only much worse since Trump is now backed by another crank in RFK Jr. whom he has appointed to the post of secretary of the department of health and human services and who has long espoused anti-vaccine views as well as promoting false theories as to the causes of major ailments.

They seem to think that they have found the cause of autism and that it is the over-the-counter analgesic Tylenol, long a staple of home remedies for fevers and minor pain. He and RFK Jr have launched a major attack on it, claiming that it can cause autism.

After months of widely trumpeted investigations spearheaded by the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump announced that pregnant women should limit their use of acetaminophen, usually branded as Tylenol in the US or paracetamol elsewhere, which he claimed heightens the risk of autism in children when it is used by pregnant women, an assertion hotly contested by scientists internationally and contradicted by studies.

Speaking from the White House, flanked by Kennedy, the president said he had “waited for 20 years for this meeting” and added: “It’s not that everything’s 100% understood or known, but I think we’ve made a lot of strides.”

But he declared: “Taking Tylenol is not good … All pregnant women should talk to their doctors about limiting the use of this medication while pregnant.”

But that anodyne report does not do justice to the fervor of their crusade. This mashup by Jimmy Kimmel of Trump’s press conference remarks conveys it much better.

These two also try to suppress information that they do not agree with. RFK Jr. had the audacity to write to a medical journal and demand that they retract an article that found no link between vaccines and autism. The journal’s editor essentially told him to get lost.

An influential US medical journal is rejecting a call from the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to retract a large Danish study that found that aluminum ingredients in vaccines do not increase health risks for children, the journal’s editor told Reuters.
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The study, which was funded by the Danish government and published in July in the Annals of Internal Medicine, analyzed nationwide registry data for more than 1.2 million children over more than two decades. It did not find evidence that exposure to aluminum in vaccines had caused an increased risk for autoimmune, atopic or allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders.

The work is by far the best available evidence on the question of the safety of aluminum in vaccines, said Adam Finn, a childhood vaccination expert in the UK and pediatrician at the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the study.

“It’s solid, [a] massive dataset and high-quality data,” he said.

And in addition, Trump is promoting a new treatment for autism, as usual based on half-baked ideas.

When President Donald Trump’s administration announced it would repurpose an old, generic drug as a new treatment for autism, it came as a surprise to many experts — including the physician who suggested the idea to the nation’s top health officials.

Dr. Richard Frye told The Associated Press that he’d been talking with federal regulators about developing his own customized version of the drug for children with autism, assuming more research would be required.

“So we were kinda surprised that they were just approving it right out of the gate without more studies or anything,” said Frye, an Arizona-based child neurologist who has a book and online education business focused on the experimental treatment.

It’s another example of the haphazard rollout of the Trump administration’s Monday announcement on autism, which critics say has elevated an unproven drug that needs far more study before being approved as a credible treatment for the complex brain disorder.
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The nation’s leading autism groups and researchers quickly distanced themselves from the decision on leucovorin, a derivative of vitamin B, calling the studies supporting its use “very weak” and ”very small.”

“We have nothing resembling even moderate evidence that leucovorin is an effective treatment for autism symptoms,” said David Mandell, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Trump and RFK Jr. seem to have this burning desire to be seen as medical savants, able to intuitively diagnose the causes of major diseases and find cures for things that decades of research by professionals have been unable to do.

The basic problem with this kind of scare-mongering and throwing out of all manner of conflicting treatments without supporting evidence, and casting doubt on accepted science, is that once people become confused and fearful, their reaction is to do nothing. There is a natural human tendency to regret more the adverse consequences of taking an action than the adverse consequences of inaction. Acts of commission seem more reprehensible than acts of omission and fear tends to win out over reason.

It is well known that acetaminophen (the main active ingredient of Tylenol) has negative effects on liver functioning. Other over-the-counter painkillers like aspirin and ibuprofen also have some negative effects. All of them should be used sparingly. But to issue blanket condemnations is to scare people away from getting pain relief.