About the Purported Tylenol, Autism, Pregnancy Links
[guest post by Dana]
Donald Trump telling pregnant women to “tough it out” instead of taking Tylenol is nothing less than infuriating and could possibly be dangerous. Add to that the claim that Tylenol usage is linked to autism is a bridge too far.
Consider what Andrea C. Love, Immunologist and Microbiologist, and Biomedical Scientist had to say about the matter:
He repackaged it for journal publication to give it the appearance of legitimacy.
Even though the strongest studies— between siblings—showed no relationship between autism & Tylenol use in pregnancy.
He cherry-picked studies & gave parent memory more weight than hard data.
2/
— Andrea C. Love, PhD (@dr_andrealove) September 21, 2025
It’s ACTUALLY the lawsuit pipeline:
1️⃣ Get paid to testify as an “expert”
2️⃣ Publish weak observational science under an academic title
3️⃣ Use the paper to get credibility for court or policy4/
— Andrea C. Love, PhD (@dr_andrealove) September 21, 2025
This is EXACTLY how RFK Jr built his career — using civil litigation against “chemicals” into a pseudoscience cash cow.
What’s wild is watching scicomm accounts sanitize this well-known tactic
WHILE our federal health agencies have been hijacked by these science deniers.
5/
— Andrea C. Love, PhD (@dr_andrealove) September 21, 2025
When Trump, RFK Jr, & their MAHA allies scream about this “new paper” as proof Tylenol causes autism:
It’s tossed-out courtroom testimony, dressed up for PubMed.
Legitimizing bad science with dangerous policy endangers you when your decisions are based on fear, not facts.
🧵
— Andrea C. Love, PhD (@dr_andrealove) September 21, 2025
Or we can sum up the mess like this:
This is being portrayed as likely to have the principal effect of making women needlessly suffer during pregnancy. If the advice is followed, untreated fever will have that effect, to be sure, but also worse: more birth defects, more miscarriages—and ironically, more autism. https://t.co/JViO6Vo5gN
— Patterico (@Patterico) September 23, 2025
—Dana
For godsake, make it stop.
Dana (aa55e2) — 9/23/2025 @ 2:34 pmThis is entirely because our culture does not teach critical thinking, let alone how science works. And no one has clean hands on this one. I think that scientists (and I am one) need to take a step back and quit letting politics muddy the waters.
Oh, how I detest politics.
I do my best to teach students how science works, and how to evaluate it.
Too many people on both sides put blinders on.
It just makes my head hurt, and makes me glad I am retiring.
Simon Jester (c8876d) — 9/23/2025 @ 3:12 pmOh, and “critical thinking” does not mean “agree with me.”
Simon Jester (c8876d) — 9/23/2025 @ 3:13 pmThe Trump-Bobby “science” is bad enough, but the optics are even worse, where two 70-plus year old men are telling pregnant women with fevers and serious pain to buck it up and walk it off.
Paul Montagu (557f44) — 9/23/2025 @ 4:18 pm#2 — totally agree, from my layperson’s perspective.
And it’s not just politics that is to be detested but money. Back in the day when I was taking lots of expert depositions, it never ceased to amaze how the opinions of very distinguished doctors — lots of initials after their names — always coincided exactly with the position of the party who hired them, and in contradiction to the opinions of the equally distinguished doctors on the other side. I recall a case where one doctor testified “the standard of care requires that you always perform procedure X in this situation” while the opposing expert testified “the standard of care requires that you never perform procedure X in this situation.” Pity the jurors who had to work through this sort of thing at trial and make a decision.
So my question is — when we see things like this WH report, how do we decide, other than based on our antipathy toward (or support for) Trump and RFK Jr. who to believe? Patterico and Dana make good points, as does Dr. Love who is cited, and their position seems intuitively correct, but the other expert also has excellent credentials, the ruling of the federal judge notwithstanding, and presumably has actually read the various studies cited in his report. Very few of us — certainly not me — have the ability or the time to evaluate claims like this about Tylenol on our own, but have to trust experts, many of whom seem to be politicized. Dr. Love seems persuasive, but perhaps she has her own undisclosed biases. Dana and Patterico seem right on this one, if only because Tylenol has been in use for so many years that if there really were an autism link you would expect strong evidence for that to have surfaced by now. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that I’m letting my own biases dictate which expert to believe. Is there actually an unbiased, unpoliticized source of information on issues like this?
RL formerly in Glendale (c21ff9) — 9/23/2025 @ 5:00 pmThere was a large 2024 study in Sweden involving 2.4 million children, mentioned in the WSJ here, finding no link.
Paul Montagu (557f44) — 9/23/2025 @ 5:13 pmHere my main concern regarding the article (I’m a soft-sciences person, some of our hard sciences people might have more/different concerns). This is not actual research, it is a review of other people’s research after they selected the studies to include. There appears to have been selection bias in the studies included. This would affect the way data was analyzed.
nic (120c94) — 9/23/2025 @ 6:40 pmThere is “science” and govt. funded research.
Joe (b3a4df) — 9/24/2025 @ 4:14 amBruh…
There’s a tweet for everything…
whembly (4ef8e4) — 9/24/2025 @ 6:12 amThere’s certainly a misleading half-story tweet for everything, especially tweets trotted out by the antivax cranks at Bobby’s HHS.
Paul Montagu (d9d3b7) — 9/26/2025 @ 7:10 am@10
Even that is misleading Paul.
Kenvue is playing the PR game for their brand.
You can hold these two simultaneously.
Medication therapy is about thetradeoff. That is:
That is one of the 1st things they teach you when you’re in the clinical field.
So, Kenvue, like other pharmaceutical companies, likes to hedge their product by saying “its not recommended for ‘x’, but talk to your doctors’ while at the same time advocate the benefits “my product has the best safety profile”.
whembly (bfd8c7) — 9/26/2025 @ 7:29 amGood to hear that you accept Trump’s additional context on the “good people” faux-controversy.
BuDuh (c85533) — 9/26/2025 @ 8:01 amAin’t nothing “faux” about it. You were already fact-checked on it.
whembly, there’s nothing contradictory about a drug-maker saying their drug is safe, especially since there are no high-quality studies that have concluded otherwise, and that they should consult their doctors. The consultation part is basic boilerplate.
Paul Montagu (d9d3b7) — 9/26/2025 @ 8:48 amThe irony is that you’re playing the left-wing liberal game of impugning for-profit corporations while defending a government agency led by a non-scientist zero-credibility grifter.
Paul Montagu (d9d3b7) — 9/26/2025 @ 8:50 amAnd right on cue, here’s our non-scientist zero-credibility president ranting even more about Tylenol and vaccines.
Paul Montagu (d9d3b7) — 9/26/2025 @ 8:56 am@14
Bro.
I work in this industry.
Do you know how many times protocol changes when studies points out effectiveness and harms of particular medication in patient population?
Nothing is ever locked in stone.
whembly (bfd8c7) — 9/26/2025 @ 9:06 amIrrelevant. There’ve already been plenty of studies. RFK and Trump are operating under their own ignorance and prejudice in making their claims, not on the prevailing body of work, going as far as cherry-picking tweets.
Paul Montagu (d9d3b7) — 9/26/2025 @ 9:26 am