President Trump is urging pregnant mothers to stop taking Tylenol, tying the common painkiller to autism, ABC News reports.
Trump shared the bombshell claim at a White House press conference where he was joined by top health officials, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who had pledged to make autism's cause known by September.
Tylenol has long been considered the safest painkiller for pregnant moms to take, but Trump said mothers should avoid it unless they have a high-risk fever.
“With Tylenol, don’t take it! Don’t take it,” Trump told reporters from the Roosevelt Room of the White House. “Ideally, you don’t take it all, but if you have to, if you can’t tough it out, if there’s a problem, you’re going to end up doing it.”
The president's contentious claims have sparked vigorous pushback from the medical community and Kenvue, the company that makes Tylenol.
"Acetaminophen is the safest pain reliever option for pregnant women as needed throughout their entire pregnancy. Without it, women face dangerous choices: suffer through conditions like fever that are potentially harmful to both mom and baby or use riskier alternatives," Kenvue said in a statement.
Some studies have found an association between the active ingredient in Tylenol, acetaminophen, and autism, but no causal link has been proven.
The Food and Drug Administration will be changing the label on Tylenol to include the warning, and doctors will be advised to tell pregnant moms to limit acetaminophen use, Trump said.
The White House cited an August meta-analysis from Harvard and Mt. Sinai that found an association between prenatal Tylenol use and autism in a majority of existing studies, but the paper's authors sounded a note of caution.
"[A]s the only approved medication for pain and fever reduction during pregnancy, acetaminophen remains an important tool for pregnant patients and their physicians," co-authors Dr. Andrea Baccarelli, dean of the faculty and professor of environmental health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told ABC News in a statement.
"High fever can pose risks to both the mother and the fetus, including neural tube defects and preterm birth."
The FDA was also less certain than Trump, noting "a causal relationship has not been established and there are contrary studies in the scientific literature."
While targeting Tylenol, Trump also suggested that children should receive vaccines less often.
Trump had recently said that vaccines work "pure and simple," but the president introduced doubts at his press conference Monday, saying the childhood vaccine schedule should be changed.
“You have a little child, little fragile child, and you get a vat of 80 different vaccines, I guess, 80 different blends, and they pump it in. So ideally, a woman won’t take Tylenol, and on the vaccines, it would be good instead of one visit where they pump the baby, you load it up with stuff, you do it over a period of four times or five times,” Trump said.
