I wrote before how the actions of the Trump administration are eerily reminiscent of the Lysenko era in the former Soviet Union when Trofim Lysenko used the power of the government to suppress genetics research that did not agree with his prejudices, setting back agriculture in the country for decades. It is clear that the ghost of Lysenko now haunts the White House and the office of RFK Jr, as they have both decided that they only want to see research that supports what they already believe

The extraordinary press conference where Trump and RFK Jr. inveighed against the over-the-counter pain-killer Tylenol (the brand name for the drug acetaminophen) took people by surprise, even though we should be used be used by now to this duo pushing crackpot theories that have little or no factual basis.

For years, scientists have studied a possible link between pregnant mothers’ use of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and neurological conditions like autism and A.D.H.D. The findings are complex. Some studies suggest a link; others do not. None have found proof of a causal relationship.

Yet Trump spoke as if the connection were definitive. He instructed pregnant women to avoid the drug. “Don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it. Fight like hell not to take it,” he said.

It s easy for him to say. But what are pregnant women supposed to do when they need an analgesic?

“We are unsure why this announcement came today and how the conclusions were drawn,” added Alison Singer, the [Autism Science Foundation’s] president, in the same statement. “No new data or scientific studies were presented or shared. No new studies have been published in the literature. No new presentations on this topic were made at scientific or medical conferences. Instead, President Trump talked about what he thinks and feels without offering scientific evidence. He said ‘tough it out,’ meaning don’t take Tylenol or give it to your child. It took me straight back to when moms were blamed for autism. If you can’t take the pain or deal with a fever, then it’s your fault if your child has autism. That was shocking. Simply shocking.”

While they did bring in vaccines, that got less emphasis.

Trump also said that he and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, had long discussed the possibility that vaccines are linked to autism. “They pump so much stuff into babies, it’s a disgrace,” he said.

Dozens of studies over the last three decades have failed to find any link between vaccines and autism. Scientists say the idea has been debunked.

The major focus on Tylenol was a surprise to that segment of the MAGA crowd that believes that vaccines are the cause of autism and were taken aback and even angered by the shift to Tylenol and are struggling to understand it.

Since President Donald Trump’s rambling Monday announcement about the supposed cause of autism and a purported new treatment, anti-vaccine groups have grappled with what the administration’s latest revelations mean for their movement. While some MAHA activists appeared to be overjoyed that the president had brought their cause to a national stage, others were frustrated that it was Tylenol, and not vaccines, that took the brunt of the blame.

The messaging of the press conference was wildly mixed. Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that Tylenol and folate deficiency could cause autism, a conclusion that has not been reached by any credible medical body. At the same time, Kennedy also implied that further studies could also implicate vaccines and suggested such research was underway at HHS.

As Ars Technica was first to point out, the focus on Tylenol led some anti-vaccine groups to push back. Many were confused about why vaccines weren’t explicitly blamed for autism, a central belief in their movement, albeit one that has been repeatedly and roundly debunked.

What the press conference did was lead to a spike in lawsuits against the company Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol. And those lawyers are now claiming that the experts whom they wanted to present at a trial and who were ruled out earlier because they lacked credibility, now have credibility because of Trump.

Keller says he filed what was among the first lawsuits alleging that prenatal acetaminophen exposure caused autism or ADHD. But in 2023, a judge ruled to exclude testimony from the experts he and his colleagues had gathered to help make their case. Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York wrote that the experts “cherry picked” and misinterpreted the data they were relying on.

“I think the judge’s other concern was that… the expert testimony was to claim that there was a causation, whereas the research itself never claims causation,” says Sonia Suter, a professor who teaches law and medicine at the George Washington University School of Law and was not involved in the case. “So there was an inconsistency between the testimony for purposes of being an expert witness and exactly what the findings of the study showed.”

But since the Trump administration cited one of those experts, Dr. Andrea Baccarelli, in their announcement this week, Keller and his team are filing a new letter with the court to support their ongoing appeal.

“One thing that I think is significant is that his scientific analysis was considered reliable enough for our nation’s executive branch officials to credit,” Keller says of Baccarelli. “And that’s a pretty good sign that his scientific expertise was reliably applied. And so that could be a relevant consideration for the Court of Appeals.”

The fact that autism has resisted for long the efforts to find a clear cause and treatment suggests that it is clearly a very complex issue. One possible contributing factor lies in the environment. While RFK Jr. in his earlier career as a lawyer dealt with environmental issues and once vowed to find the environmental causes of autism, he later seems to have largely abandoned that and has shut down the agency that was studying exactly that issue.

As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, [Erin] McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.

For 20 years, Kennedy has espoused the debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines, dismissing evidence to the contrary by arguing that vaccine manufacturers, researchers and regulators all have an interest in obscuring their harms.

He remains skeptical of the scientists who have been funded by his own agency to study the neurodevelopmental condition. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he told right-wing host Tucker Carlson in a June interview, going on to suggest that previous studies that found no relationship between vaccines and autism were marred by “trickery” and researchers’ self-interest.

In contrast, Kennedy told Carlson that under his leadership, and with a new, federally funded $50 million autism research initiative, “We’re going to get real studies done for the first time.”

Some autism researchers fear that the effort will manipulate data to blame the condition on vaccines. “Kennedy has never expressed an open mind, an open attitude towards what are the fundamental causes of autism,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University psychologist who founded a coalition of scientists concerned about his approach to autism. In a June statement, the group said the initiative lacks transparency and that Kennedy “casually ignores decades of high quality research that preceded his oversight.”

As Kennedy promotes his new initiative, ProPublica has found that he has also taken aim at the traditional scientific approach to autism, shutting down McCanlies’ lab and stripping funding from more than 50 autism-related studies. Meanwhile, he has stood by as the Trump administration encourages the departure of hundreds of federal employees with experience studying the harm caused by environmental threats and rolls back protections from pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism.

“We need to stop trusting the experts?” Then whom should we trust? This is classic Lysenkoism, deciding what answer you want and then doing ‘research’ until you get it.

(WuMo)

No reasonable person would suggest that we should blindly trust experts. Nearly a century ago, Bertrand Russell suggested a reasonably skeptical attitude to expert opinion.

I am prepared to admit the ordinary beliefs of common sense, in practice if not in theory. I am prepared to admit any well- established result of science, not as certainly true, but as sufficiently probable to afford a basis for rational action.
. . .
There are matters about which those who have investigated them are agreed. … There are other matters about which experts are not agreed. Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken… Nevertheless the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by non- experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion. The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

These propositions may seem mild, yet, if accepted, they would absolutely revolutionise human life. (Russell, Bertrand. 1928. Sceptical Essays. London: Routledge, pp 2-3)

Trump and RFK Jr, go against all three of those precepts.