President Trump could not have been more emphatic.
“Don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it. Fight like hell not to take it,” he said from the White House on Monday, issuing a warning to pregnant women based on an unproven link between the medication and autism.
When a reporter remarked that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists disagreed with his assessment, Mr. Trump said: “You know what? Maybe they’re right. I don’t think they are.”
Dating back to his first term, when he mused about injecting bleach to kill off the coronavirus, Mr. Trump has used his position of authority to dole out medical advice, some of it deeply flawed. He often strays from the scientific consensus, seeking out individuals who will confirm his own hunches. Or he will elevate people recommending unproven treatments that they promise will make a problem go away quickly.
On Monday, Mr. Trump seemed to be in the driver’s seat, celebrating the announcement and going even further than guidance issued by the Food and Drug Administration. The agency did not unequivocally state that pregnant women should not take Tylenol but rather that health care providers should consider the risks and discuss them with their patients.
For years, scientists have studied a possible link between pregnant mothers’ use of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and neurological conditions like autism. Some studies suggest a link; others do not. None have found proof of a causal relationship.
“One of the things that puts health care providers and public health experts at a disadvantage in messaging is that we do communicate with nuance, and we don’t always have simple answers,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and editor at large for public health at KFF Health News.
For that reason, Dr. Gounder, who also served on President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s coronavirus advisory board, said she grows concerned whenever someone without medical or scientific training talks about evidence-based research or makes medical recommendations.
“We, as health care providers, do get held up to a certain standard,” she said. “We can get sued if we make a recommendation that is harmful to our patients.”
Mr. Trump has long cast doubt on the advice of medical professionals, and he routinely ignored officials in his first term during the pandemic. He largely refused to wear a mask, even as the federal guidance recommended Americans do so. He promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, for treating coronavirus against the advice of medical experts. He elevated officials who had rosier outlooks on the pandemic and sidelined or pushed out those who warned about his approach. Since returning to office, Mr. Trump has elevated vaccine skeptics, and his administration has defunded vaccine research.
Dr. Paul Friedrichs, a military combat surgeon and retired Air Force major general who helped lead the Covid-19 response in the Trump and Biden administrations, called the president’s comments “dangerous.”
“He is a very effective communicator with his political base, and his statements complicate the ability of health care providers to give advice to their patients,” he said. “It puts the patients in the middle of having to reconcile their belief in him as a political leader and the best advice from medical professionals.”
Throughout his life, Mr. Trump has sought out opportunities to close deals and is quick to declare mission accomplished, even prematurely. He was eager for Monday’s announcement in part because he viewed it as delivering on another campaign promise, his advisers said, and he spent the last several days hyping it to his supporters.
“I think we found an answer to autism,” he said on Sunday during his speech at the memorial service for the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “How about that?”
Many of the president’s supporters applauded the announcement on Monday, expressing their appreciation that a presidential administration was committed to investigating the causes of autism. To illustrate that sentiment, Mr. Trump was joined on Monday by two mothers of children with autism who thanked the president for his focus on the issue. But even one of the mothers, Amanda Rumer, suggested that she was not completely sold on the link between the disease and the drug.
“I have no idea,” Ms. Rumer said in her remarks at the White House announcement. “I am completely open. I’m not blaming anything, but I’m open to the discussion and the fact that there’s work being done to find answers.”
At the White House, the health officials backed up their announcement by referring to a recent scientific review by epidemiologists at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The article concluded that there was a link between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental disorders, but one of the co-authors of the study, Dr. Andrea Baccarelli, said more research was needed to determine whether there was a causal link.
The president was much less careful with his words, and White House officials said Mr. Trump’s excitement reflected his concern for the health of the American people.
“The president was driven to run for office because of this conviction, and remains committed to using his executive authority and gold standard science to make America healthy again and address skyrocketing rates of autism and other chronic conditions,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
But even some of Mr. Trump’s former advisers questioned the effectiveness of the announcement. Dr. Jerome Adams, who served as Mr. Trump’s surgeon general in his first term but has spoken out against his administration’s vaccine skepticism, criticized the news conference and pointed his followers to research that showed no causal link between Tylenol and autism.
“I honestly don’t see,” he wrote on social media, “how we are supporting worried parents by giving them false hope (telling them avoiding Tylenol will prevent autism), or laying false blame (insinuating their failure to “tough it out” caused their child’s autism).”