Studies: Tylenol Doesn't Cause Autism, MRNA Vaccines Are Perfectly Safe, And RFK Jr. Is A Ridiculous Person
... who believes ridiculous things.
Last September, Donald Trump, backed up by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Oz, and Dr. Dorothy Fink (who, I will remind you, is the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, not the keyboardist for Prince and The Revolution), held a little press conference to announce that they had, as promised, found the cause of autism. Surprise! It was Tylenol all along!
Or, rather, there were a few studies suggesting that taking Tylenol (acetaminophen/paracetamol) during pregnancy could possibly exacerbate a genetic predisposition to autism, and many more that determined that there was no link whatsoever. This, however, had been a long-time “thing” for RFK Jr., who was eager to get the bad science out there.
But hey! Even if they turned out to be wrong, it was better to err on the side of not-autism. As Trump so eloquently put it that day, “Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.”
Except, you know, for the fact that a fever during pregnancy can cause multiple complications, including birth defects.
The press conference seems to have done what it was intended to do — a study published in The Lancet found that the use of Tylenol during pregnancy has dropped by 10 percent since that announcement.
However, it turns out that they were even more wrong than previously suspected (which was pretty damned wrong), and yet another enormous study has found literally no link between autism and Tylenol.
For the study, recently published in JAMA, researchers started with a cohort of over 700,000 mother-child pairs in Hong Kong, approximately 43 percent of whom had been exposed to acetaminophen in utero. From this, “a sibling-matched cohort was constructed of 124,333 children who were assessed for ASD and 97,285 for ADHD” — and the researchers found that there was no increased risk of either in the children who had prenatal exposure to the acetaminophen.
More than that, the results did not vary based on the amount of exposure to acetaminophen, when it was taken during pregnancy, the age of the mother or any other parameters.
Oh, and they also figured out why some studies did find a link.
Via Ars Technica:
Interestingly, there was a link when the researchers dropped the sibling-matched design and instead compared acetaminophen-exposed with unexposed children, which is a finding that has come up in other studies. But when the researchers performed a “negative control” analysis and compared children whose mothers had taken acetaminophen before ever getting pregnant or after they had given birth compared to mothers who didn’t use the painkiller, they also saw an association—one that is “biologically implausible.”
“Collectively, these findings suggest that the positive signal observed in both conventional and negative control analyses reflect residual familial confounding, rather than a true pharmacologic effect of prenatal paracetamol exposure,” the researchers concluded.
Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that as many people are going to hear about this as heard Trump’s original “DO NOT TAKE IT!!!” pronouncement, and those who believed him are unlikely to mind this study.
That’s not the only bad news for MAHA this week. A comprehensive review published in The Lancet this week analyzed billions of doses of currently approved mRNA vaccines and found that mRNA vaccines are safe and effective for preventing infectious diseases like COVID-19, and that serious side effects are extremely rare, whether Republicans like it or not. Oh, and not only are they rare, the risk of getting myocarditis from the vaccine is significantly lower than getting it from COVID (which we already knew, but it’s nice to see it proven again).
From the press release (bolding mine):
The review concludes that serious adverse side effects from mRNA vaccines remain exceedingly rare. For example, in real world surveillance, incidents of myocarditis and pericarditis (heart-related inflammation) following vaccination were higher among second-dose recipients, with rates of roughly 12.6 cases per million for Pfizer BioNTech’s BNT162b2 vaccine and about 35.6 cases per million for Moderna’s mRNA-1273. Importantly, the increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis from mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, particularly in males aged 12-19, was significantly lower than the risk of developing myocarditis or pericarditis from a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Other serious adverse events were also very rare. For example, the risk of anaphylaxis was 4.7 cases per million doses (Pfizer), and Guilainne Barre Syndrome was 38 cases per million doses (AstraZeneca) [see table]. Most other side effects, such as sore arms, fatigue, or fever, were mild to moderate and subsided after a few days.
Of course, the people who believe mRNA vaccines are uniquely dangerous for reasons they can’t quite explain are not going to be convinced that they are safe. And that is unfortunate, because there is so much potential for them beyond just COVID. As the press release notes, in the future, we could very well have “vaccines against influenza, RSV, and other infectious diseases, as well as for personalised cancer vaccines and RNA-based therapeutics.”
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And it’s not that far away, either. The CBC highlighted a current clinical trial investigating the possibility of using mRNA technology to treat bladder cancer:
Dr. Ramy Saleh, an associate professor of oncology at Montreal’s McGill University, is part of a global randomized clinical trial evaluating an mRNA-based approach to treating bladder cancer.
The mRNA vaccines for cancer are custom built for each patient’s tumour, Saleh said.
First, surgeons remove the tumour. Next, scientists sequence it to find mutations specific to the tumour that aren’t found in the patient’s healthy DNA. Finally, a personalized mRNA therapy is given to prime the patient’s immune system to find and attack lingering cancer cells.
“The logic behind it is if our immune system knows that there are cancer cells and attacks them, the chances of a relapse or the cancer coming back will be much lower and the chances of a cure increase,” Saleh said.
Truly, if that works … that’s going to be incredible. Can you imagine?
I have to say, it actually breaks my heart that there are people out there who have decided to believe in these bizarre conspiracy theories about the mRNA vaccine. A recent study found that 46 percent of Americans think that more people have died from the COVID-19 vaccines than from COVID-19 itself, and 36 percent believe that mRNA vaccines can alter one’s DNA. The study did find that only 16 percent view mRNA vaccines across the board as “generally unsafe,” but 52 percent said they don’t know enough to be sure. And that’s not great either.
This is something that we should all be able to be excited about and to benefit from, and it really is sad that it probably won’t be the case.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
"Ridiculous" is not anywhere near the first adjective that comes to mind, in re: BrainwurmzJr.
Hoping we can retake the House in the fall so we can immediately impeach this fucking leather frog junkie crank Secretary of Death.