Tylenol-maker Kenvue got a headache last week that its signature product cannot cure after Health and Human Services (HSS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused acetaminophen, Tylenol’s active ingredient, of causing autism.

Kennedy announced in April that he would find a cause for autism, and it became a signature promise of his “Make America Healthy Again” movement. He was not about to let annoyances such as time or evidence stop him.

He and the administration went full speed at a White House news conference last week, where President Trump, who in his first term waxed philosophical about bringing light into the body and injecting bleach as methods to cure, warned that pregnant women should not take acetaminophen.

Pregnant women should avoid a multitude of things. But acetaminophen was, until the announcement, one of the simplest and only options to treat pain while pregnant, and it was the first-line treatment for fevers.

Nothing has changed since Kennedy took his post at the head of HHS to change those treatment guidelines. The study in which the Trump administration has been clinging to the most was published in the journal “JAMA Psychiatry” in 2020.

That study analyzed 1,000 mothers with differing levels of acetaminophen drawn from the umbilical cord, and they were split into three groups from low to high levels. This study did show a risk of up to 262% increased odds that a child born to a mother with the highest levels of acetaminophen use would have autism.

But correlation does not mean causation, and science works best when theories are further tested, which was the case with acetaminophen in pregnancies. 

A follow-up study published in the “Journal of the American Medical Association” in 2024 analyzed 2 million children born over two decades in Sweden, tossing water on its predecessor.

The Swedish study used sibling pairs in an attempt to create a control group, where one was exposed to acetaminophen and one was not. The findings erased the association between autism and acetaminophen that was found in the earlier study.

So, how did the doctors at HHS conclude that Trump should go on stage and tell febrile mothers not to take Tylenol? They didn’t. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Food and Drug Administration, which falls under the purview of HHS, only went as far to say that they “consider minimizing the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy for routine low-grade fevers.”

It was Trump and Kennedy that decided to zero in on acetaminophen, the Journal says, and the FDA was left to play cleanup via a follow-up notification.

“To be clear, while an association between acetaminophen and autism has been described in many studies, a causal relationship has not been established, and there are contrary studies in the scientific literature,” the official notice said after the White House conference.

The FDA’s primary goal for the presser was to suggest that it found a potential treatment for autism. That treatment ­— a medication called leucovorin — is a treatment for chemotherapy side-effects, and it is derived from folate, a common vitamin taken in prenatal care.

This sounds promising, but it requires more study as far as the professional recommendations go. But now is not the time for studies. Rather than conduct further studies on leucovorin, the administration wants to approve its use for autism, saying they can analyze the results as a form of immediate feedback.

If this sounds familiar to you, it should. The COVID-19 vaccines were approved for emergency use and were expected to have their treatment data studied in real-time. Kennedy’s opposition to that “experiment” is what propelled him back into the spotlight. Now he wants to make a monster out of acetaminophen and launch an experimental treatment. It is hypocrisy. 

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