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President Donald Trump announced that taking the common pain relief drug Tylenol during pregnancy can lead to an increased risk of autism for unborn babies, due to the drug’s active ingredient acetaminophen.
“Today we’re delighted to be joined by America’s top medical and public health professionals as we announce historic steps to confront the crisis of autism,” said Trump.
Speaking from the White House on Monday, the president said that Tylenol taken during pregnancy “can be associated with a very increased risk of autism.”
President Donald Trump linked acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, to autism and urged pregnant women to largely avoid the medication in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (Francis Chung/Politico/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“The meteoric rise in autism is among the most alarming public health developments in history. There’s never been anything like this,” he said.
“So taking Tylenol is not good,” he said. “For this reason, they are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary.”
Trump also warned against over-vaccinating babies and children, saying, “It’s too much liquid, too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number the size of this thing. When you look at it, it’s like 80 different vaccines and beyond vaccines, 80, and you give that to a little kid.”
The Trump administration said in April it would kick off a massive research initiative to understand the cause of autism by September, and the president hinted at the announcement Sunday at the memorial service for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “Tomorrow we’re going to have one of the biggest announcement(s) … medically, I think, in the history of our country. I think you’re going to find it to be amazing,” he said.
Tylenol manufacturer Kenvue has said it strongly disagrees with the administration’s assessment and said that “acetaminophen is the safest pain reliever option for pregnant women.”
“We believe independent, sound science clearly shows that taking acetaminophen does not cause autism,” a company spokesperson said. “We strongly disagree with any suggestion otherwise and are deeply concerned with the health risk this poses for expecting mothers.”
Speaking during the Monday press conference, however, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said that “we now have data we cannot ignore.”
Makary said that a collection of studies, including from the Boston Birth Cohort, the Nurses Health Study and Mount Sinai-Harvard have established that there is a “causal relationship between prenatal acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders of ADHD and autism spectrum disorder.”
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Neil Gorsuch, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, President Donald Trump, actress Cheryl Hines, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services and his children, Kyra and Kathleen, in the White House Oval Office Feb. 13, 2025. (Jason C. Andrew/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. said that the NIH, FDA, CDC, and CMS are “turning over every stone to identify the ideology of the autism epidemic and how patients and parents can prevent and reverse this alarming trend.”
“We have broken down the traditional silos that have long separated these agencies, and we have fast-tracked research and guidance,” said Kennedy. “Historically, NIH has focused on almost solely on politically safe and entirely fruitless research about the genetic drivers of autism. And that would be like studying the genetic drivers of lung cancer without looking at cigarettes, and that’s what NIH has been doing for 20 years.”
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Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pointed to environmental factors as the root cause of autism. (Getty)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a survey in April that found that autism prevalence is on the rise and said the increase “might be due to differences in availability of services for early detection and evaluation and diagnostic practices.”
Specifically, the survey found that one in 31 8-year-old children were diagnosed with autism in 2022 — up from one in 36 in 2000.
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a news conference on the autism report by the CDC at the Hubert Humphrey Building Auditorium in Washington, April 16, 2025. (Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press)
Kennedy has also pointed to environmental factors as the root cause of autism.
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“This is coming from an environmental toxin, and somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food,” Kennedy said in April at an event related to the CDC’s report. “And it’s to their benefit to say ‘Oh, to normalize it, to say all this is all normal, it’s always been here.’ That’s not good for our country.”
