Where The Hell Do We Even Begin With Trump's Autism Nonsense?
If you just keep saying 'gold standard science,' maybe people will believe you're producing it?
On Monday, Donald Trump and his good pals Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, and Dr. Dorothy Fink (who is the assistant HHS secretary, not the keyboardist for Prince’s Revolution) held a press conference to announce that they have discovered the cause of autism, and that it is acetaminophen — or, because he could not pronounce acetaminophen, Tylenol. Maybe. Probably not, but they had to make an announcement anyway, proclaiming that pregnant women and infants should not take Tylenol, because it just might cause autism (which it does not). Besides, as he so eloquently put it, “Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.”
How true that is.
Unless, you know, you have a fever. Because if you do have a fever and are pregnant, then acetaminophen is literally the only safe thing to take. It is also the only over-the-counter pain reliever and fever reducer that is safe for children under six months.
And yet, he proclaims: “Don’t take it! Don’t take it! DON’T TAKE IT!”
Is it true? Does acetaminophen cause autism? It does not. Or at least there’s no serious scientific evidence demonstrating that it does. (And of course you’ve already heard and read that the first medical descriptions of autism, which people have lived with throughout history anyway, predate the availability of acetaminophen.) There’s nothing wrong with continuing to research it, but as of right now there’s nothing to say that it does and a whole lot to say that it does not.
Researcher Ann Bauer, whose research was cited as one of the sources for the announcement, says she is “sick to her stomach” that the administration would misrepresent the data like that.
A fact sheet released alongside the White House briefing cited Bauer’s analysis. But she was alarmed by Trump’s comments. If prenatal Tylenol has any association, which it may not, it would help account for only a fraction of cases, she said. Further, research has not deeply examined Tylenol risks in young children, and many rigorous studies refute a link between vaccines and autism.
Bauer worries such statements will cut both ways: People may put themselves at risk to avoid vaccines and Tylenol, the only safe painkiller for use during pregnancy. And she frets that scientists might outright reject her team’s measured concerns about Tylenol in a backlash against misleading remarks from Trump and other members of his “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
She probably doesn’t have to worry about the latter, as most normal people don’t base their personal opinions about scientific data on personal annoyances.
It’s hard to know where to even begin with the other bizarre claims asserted in this sideshow, but let’s start with the insistence that there is no autism among the Amish or in Cuba because the Amish don’t have vaccines and the Cubans don’t have any Tylenol. There is, of course, autism in both of these communities (though it is considered to be underdiagnosed in both), there is no Amish precept against vaccines, and the Cubans do not have Tylenol because Tylenol is not sold in Cuba. They do, however, have paracetamol, which is the same thing. There are, however, shortages of that and just about every other medication in Cuba, because of the incredibly stupid and cruel United States embargo against them.
That doesn’t mean that they’re not getting any at all, it just means they don’t have enough. We can probably assume, also, that pregnant women and infants are first on the list for getting it.
This is not hard.
Trump also claimed that spacing out vaccinations rather than getting 80 of them at once can also prevent autism. I guess it’s a good thing that absolutely no one is doing that. However, parents should not be in charge of spacing out vaccinations further than they are already spaced out, because they do not know what they are doing with that. Certain vaccinations have to be taken multiple times and at specific intervals in order to be fully effective.
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary claimed that fevers are fine, actually, and that they are just the body’s way of healing itself — so parents shouldn’t give their kids fever reducers anyway. This is very, very incorrect. Dangerously so. Let’s also note here that the supposed reason they wanted to separate the chickenpox vaccine and the MMR vaccine was because of a slightly elevated risk of febrile seizures … which are caused by fevers.
Trump and others kept repeating the “1 in 31” statistic of kids with autism diagnoses. This sounds like a lot, but it would really just mean that, in a school class of 100, three might be on the spectrum. I’m not sure that’s all that crazy, given the expanding criteria.
Perhaps the most galling moment of the event was when Kennedy talked about how we need to “listen” to the mothers who say their kids got autism from vaccines and stop demonizing and “gaslighting” them — and pointed out that “some of our friends” say “believe all women” (which we don’t, though some disingenuous folks sure like to pretend we do).
First of all, no one is accusing these women of lying, we are accusing them of believing something that is not factually true. They believe this, in part, because of motherfuckers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who tell them that this is what happened to their children. Who tell them that their children have autism because they failed as mothers and got them vaccinated. Who don’t bother to point out to them, ever, that the rates of autism in vaccinated and unvaccinated children are exactly the same.
Second, there is a little something of a difference between knowing you’ve been raped and knowing your child got autism from a vaccine. The idea that “Believe women” ever meant that women are never wrong about anything is patently absurd.
The grand irony of the entire press conference was that everyone up there kept insisting that, somehow, all the previous “science” on autism was “politicized” and that their new “gold standard science” is not, despite the fact that it is specifically directed toward creating the outcome that Trump, Kennedy and others want. They have decided that it simply cannot be what it actually is — that we have a more nuanced understanding of autism than we did previously, that it is now a spectrum disorder that includes a variety of behaviors and symptoms that used to be classified as other disorders, that we don’t institutionalize children and people in general the way we once did (the way the Kennedys did).
As with everything else the Right believes, this is based on “vibes,” not facts.
But this is all political. It’s about vengeance against the bad liberals and the bad scientists who have made them feel stupid, it’s about getting to declare “victory” over something big, BIG! It’s about their own egos. They just want “a win.”
And right now, their egos also serendipitously want them to make women blame themselves for “harming” their children with insufficiently pure pregnancies, for not “toughing it out” through pain and fever. When in doubt, it’s probably Eve’s fault, after all.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
If you need serious medical advice, maybe don't turn to President Bleach-Up-Your-Ass.
If I'm gonna take medical advice from a former heroin addict I chose Keith Richards.