Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. on Thursday was back on the anti-Tylenol bandwagon at the White House, making unproven claims that there is a link between Tylenol, autism, and circumcision.
Kennedy said that infant boys given Tylenol for pain following a circumcision have double the rate of autism.
Kennedy also said that anti-Trump people were likely to not believe the theory.
FACT CHECK: True! While women in general are less likely than men to believe the Trump administration claims that Tylenol causes autism, more than half of Republican women are likely to believe there is a connection, while only 13% of Democrat women believe the false claim.
Kennedy said that he had seen a TikTok video on Thursday, which he said featured a pregnant woman “gobbling Tylenol” and cursing Trump. “The level of Trump derangement syndrome has now left the political landscape and now in the realm of pathology,” he said. Kennedy also said the woman was taking Tylenol “with a baby in her placenta.”
ANOTHER FACT CHECK: A fetus develops in the uterus, not in the placenta!
“Anybody who takes the stuff during pregnancy unless they have to is, is irresponsible,” Kennedy told Trump and fellow Cabinet members. “It is not proof. We’re doing the studies to make the proof.”
Kennedy seems to be referring to a 2015 study of boys in Denmark under the age of 10, from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
The study found that those who had undergone the procedure, which involves the removal of the foreskin from the penis, were more likely to develop autism than other boys in the study. Researchers suggested a potential link might be due to the pain of the procedure. Researchers noted that they had no data on painkillers or anesthetics used, and thus couldn’t address whether Tylenol was linked to autism.
Other researchers pointed out that the Denmark study looked at correlation, not causation.
They also point to other studies that found no evidence to support a link between circumcision and autism.