Tyl and error

“DON’T TAKE TYLENOL,” the President advised pregnant women, forcefully, in the Oval Office yesterday afternoon, because his Administration now says that acetaminophen causes childhood autism. Trump said it at least a dozen times. Also, he said, don’t give Tylenol to your children after they get a shot. Speaking of shots, President Trump said, kids shouldn’t get their Hepatitis B vaccine until they’re 12, because Hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease. In addition, he recommends breaking up the MMR vaccine into three separate shots, because that’s a lot of liquid. “It’s a fragile little child and it looks like they’re pumping it into a horse,” he said.

It was a typically eccentric Trump event. The main three speakers were Trump, RFK Jr., and Dr. Oz. Trump said that pregnant women should only take Tylenol in an emergency. “If you can’t tough it out, if you can’t do it, that’s what you’re gonna have to do,” Trump said. But any attempts to spin this as quackery unfounded in science are going to fall flat.

In fact, the acetaminophen warnings come from a study that the Harvard School of Public Health, hardly a Trump-driven institution, published a month ago. FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary also announced a push to give a drug called leucovorin to children with autism. Leucovorin is essentially a vitamin supplement used to address folate deficiency in cancer patients, and studies have found it’s effective in treating autism symptoms, which now affect approximately one in 31 of American children, and one in a dozen boys. That was the essential substance of the press conference, during which Trump showed a lot of sympathy for children with autism and their families. He also said that he has a lot of “fat friends” who take Ozempic. “Let me tell you,” he said. “They don’t look so good.”

But beyond the President’s War On Tylenol, which will clearly grab all the headlines, this press conference signified something much more important. Appearing with Trump were RFK Jr. from HHS, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from the National Institutes of Health, Makary from the FDA, and Dr. Oz, who these days only appears on TV to talk about his work in running the Medicaid program. They spoke in a unified voice about this issue.

RFK said, “we have broken down barriers between agencies, and fast-tracked solutions.” This will be the first in a series of autism announcements that “will be a model to deliver the framework for similar results for other chronic conditions that plague Americans.” Makary said “this is The start of a historic shift in medical culture. A charge to identify root causes. We’re not going to stop until we address the root causes of this suffering. It may be entirely preventable.”

This marks an extraordinary cultural shift. Typically, the FDA, HHS, NIH, and Centers for Disease Control have operated within silos of research and information. Their lack of coordination and communication have led to a massive public-health crisis that formed the basis for the MAHA movement. This is significant way beyond the President issuing the same warning about Tylenol for pregnant women a dozen times in an hour. He’s just the very loud messenger. But the health and medicine branch of his Administration is united with common purpose, and it’s going to yield extremely interesting and highly controversial results.

Quite telling is the fact that the major voice speaking out against the Administration’s Tylenol warnings is Kenvue, the drug’s manufacturer. Oh, and also The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which issued a statement saying that Tylenol is safe for pregnant women. At the event, a reporter brought this up. After Trump was doing calling it a “nasty question,” he said, dismissively, “That’s the establishment. They’re funded by lots of different groups. Maybe they’re right.”
“But I don’t think they are.”