In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.

For the first time ever, I wished it were 2020 again.

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At least when President Donald Trump nonsensically asked his coronavirus task force if we could inject ourselves with “ultraviolet” or “the disinfectant,” we were all running like chickens with heads cut off in a desperate pursuit to escape a once-in-a-century pandemic. And while Trump rambled about using “the heat and the light” to treat the mysterious Chinese virus, his Operation Warp Speed was racing to create what was arguably the most successful vaccination campaign in human history, with injections administered to the public less than a year after COVID landed on American soil.

Monday’s press conference room was the funhouse mirror version of the purgatory of 2020. In Roosevelt Room remarks that the White House teased would solve the origins of autism, the Trump administration’s top doctors — National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary — were eager to platform leucovorin, an obscure and generic form of folate that has shown shocking success at improving language development in autistic patients in limited and early studies. By no means was the administration ready to declare a silver bullet, but the early success of the drug is one of the most promising new treatments in years.

Instead, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced something arguably less proven than the efficacy of UV rays in killing COVID. For the millionth time in his life, Kennedy teased that autism was possibly caused by vaccines, but in an edict on behalf of the White House, Kennedy asserted a “potential association between acetaminophen used during pregnancy and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes,” directing the FDA to declare a warning that Tylenol use risks causing autism.

It’s not just appalling that this White House, which has claimed it will revolutionize a new era of gold-standard science, is rehashing correlational studies that do not stand up to strict scrutiny. Rather, Kennedy, who has called autism an “epidemic” that constitutes “a holocaust,” has culminated a career’s worth of efforts to warn pregnant women sternly not to take … an over-the-counter medication?

The earliest autism diagnoses and research emerged around 99 years ago. Acetomenophin was not sold to American patients until a quarter-century later. Kennedy, a left-wing socialist like the rest of his family, was reportedly running up on his September deadline to “solve” autism when he summoned the interim CEO of Tylenol manufacturer Kenvue to create a culprit. Because the anti-vax conspiracy theories have been so breathlessly promoted by their adherents that they’ve been definitively debunked, Kennedy had to pick on Kenvue lest he let another Big Pharma giant walk free.

The data, of course, do not bear out Kennedy’s thesis, something the white coats behind him eventually had to concede.

While the actual gold standard for medical research is a double-blind randomized control trial, hypotheses involving pregnancy often cannot be tested this way for the sheer ethical matter that a fetus can be harmed. Instead, medical researchers can find a close, but not perfect, substitute in sibling studies. For example, in a general population study of single children, it’s difficult to control for the differences between the mothers’ lifestyles, education, income, and so on. With a sibling study, researchers can compare outcomes with only one variable changed. A sibling study means that instead of comparing a nonsmoking, working mother with an alcoholic welfare queen, we’re comparing outcomes based on only the variable we want to test.

A September 2025 study of more than 200,000 Japanese babies found that Tylenol had zero impact on autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder risk when controlling for siblings. A 2024 JAMA study of 2.5 million Swedish siblings did not establish an increased risk of autism for a sister whose mother took Tylenol during her pregnancy versus a brother whose same mother didn’t take Tylenol during his pregnancy. While the topline data comparing children across mothers showed a correlation between autism and acetaminophen, the link disappears upon sibling analysis.

Makary had to admit that “a causal relationship has not been established,” given that the garbage Harvard study Kennedy relied on does not even attempt to establish a causal relationship at all.

It’s at this point that we have to debunk the notion further that there’s an autism “epidemic” at all.

MAHA’s favorite statistic to repeat is that autism rates quintupled from 2000 to 2022. It’s true that this is a massive product of diagnostic drift, with various iterations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders expanding the parameters of a once-narrow diagnosis to include profound autism cases of patients with low-double-digit IQs and high-functioning Asperger’s savants like Elon Musk. But poor public policy also encouraged school districts and parents to juice the numbers artificially.

The great Cremieux Recueil has published a tome on all the shocking and specific instances of how reporting requirements begged for bloated data — in one case, Massachusetts saw a quintupling of autism cases in just one year thanks to policy changes — but the topline finding is that when states implement a policy of rewarding school districts for diagnoses, diagnoses immediately rise by about 25%. Only 15% of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s increase in total autism diagnoses are due to profound autism, the patients Kennedy scorns for being unable to “pay taxes” or “write a poem.”

To the extent that there has been a small increase in profound autism cases beyond diagnostic drift and poor policy, what is the culprit? Assertive mating that clusters autism-adjacent personalities is one thesis, as is the overall poor state of maternal health and weight. But one correlation that actually plays out in sibling studies isn’t about old mothers, but old fathers.

In a Swedish study of siblings born to the same parents, a younger sibling was at a much higher risk for autism when a father was older than 45, compared to an older sibling fathered by the same man in his 20s.

Why would Kennedy not be interested in such a compelling link? Beyond the fact that there’s no job-creating company to blame, it may be his own guilt, as he fathered his youngest known child when he was 47.

Kennedy follows the science of autism the same way Anthony Fauci did for COVID. In other words, they both settled on their preferred hypotheses first and bastardized the data while working backward to fit their desired conclusion.

Trump and allies like Musk have correctly lamented the nation’s growing birth dearth. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the country’s native-born population will begin shrinking indefinitely by 2033, with our current total fertility rate slated to halve our native-born population at some point by the end of the century. Beyond the emotional crises of loneliness created by an aging and dying population, a demographic collapse is also a national security and fiscal crisis as Americans become outnumbered by our adversaries and unable to pay for our own bloated social safety net.

All of this is to say that the last thing young women, who report desiring parenthood less than their male counterparts, need to hear from Trump is that they need to “tough it out” and abstain not just from proven and semiproven harms to pregnancy, such as WineSushiCigarettesSaunasCoffeeBolognaTartareCamembertSwordfishPoachedEggs, but also completely unproven, over-the-counter painkillers. This is made even more egregious when you consider that the alternative to Tylenol, NSAID pain relievers, are proven dangerous to pregnancies, and high fevers are arguably proven even more dangerous than that.

Already, Kennedy’s HHS has made clear that the “Make America Healthy Again” mothers are the first victims of its crackdown. Despite mental health conditions being the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths, the FDA has begun its widely lambasted campaign against pregnant women’s ability to use mental health medications during pregnancy. Similarly, Kennedy’s “Operation Stork Speed” is focused on vilifying seed oils and high fructose corn syrup in infant formula, with the eventual goal of imposing further regulations on an industry that already suffers from catastrophic shortages.

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The prevailing message thus far is that pregnant women should not take Tylenol for a headache, the mental health medications encouraged by their own physicians, or poison their babies with dirty seed oil formulas, which, news flash, are literally all manufactured in America. It’s the inverse of Trump’s 2020 success: Instead of solving a once-in-a-lifetime crisis with a once-in-a-lifetime innovation, Kennedy’s HHS picks on 75-year-old generic drugs and mothers to solve an age-old disorder.

At least when Trump teased bleach and barbarism to take down COVID, he was producing one of the greatest technical and logistical achievements in medical history behind the scenes. Kennedy’s crusade against autism and to make America healthy again has really only gone after one target: the mothers who made it famous.