When people peddle medical myths, real families pay the price, and no one knows this better than autistic people.
First, vaccines were blamed after a study by Andrew Wakefield sparked widespread fear that the MMR vaccine was linked to autism. It isn’t and the study and claims have been repeatedly debunked and retracted since 2010.
Now it seems the Trump administration is keen to make a common household product the culprit – paracetamol.
Over the weekend, reports surfaced that officials around Donald Trump have supposedly linked prenatal use of the popular medicine Tylenol (which is known as paracetamol elsewhere in the world) to autism.
On Monday, Trump claimed that paracetamol usage during pregnancy is associated with ‘a very increased risk of autism, and… it’s not good’.
Let me be clear: this story isn’t just wrong. It’s dangerous.
And as an autistic adult, mother to an autistic child, and the owner of two companies that support autistic and ADHD adults, I will not stand by and watch this false narrative unfold without comment.
I can see why the White House is keen to make such a claim: one simple cause, one easy fix, one target for public anger. Not to mention that it coincides nicely with the pledge the leader of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F Kennedy Jr, made back in April to find the cause of autism in five months.
But the fact is, the science we have seen thus far doesn’t agree.
Major medical bodies – including both the NHS and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists – continue to treat paracetamol as the first-line pain relief in pregnancy.
When used as directed, paracetamol has been proven to improve quality of life by helping to treat conditions including viral infections and headaches. In fact, experts say there is no reason to avoid it during pregnancy if pain or a high temperature needs treating.
Do you know what can harm a foetus? An untreated fever. Yet, according to Trump, pregnant people should only be using it when they ‘can’t tough it out’.
That won’t protect babies – nor will stirring up fear that vaccines, including the MMR vaccine, and the frequency with which they are given may be harmful – but it could increase skepticism around vaccines and traditional medicine, and thus risk the safety of a foetus or baby.
It’s baffling to me that the White House would choose to make such statements when the findings into this so-called ‘link’ between autism and acetaminophen have not been proven by reputable studies.
In fact, in large, careful studies – including a 2024 Swedish sibling study designed to control for shared genetics and environment – no relationship between prenatal paracetamol exposure and autism, ADHD or intellectual disability was found.
That matters because sibling studies cut through a lot of the noise that makes weaker studies look scary.
So why do these claims keep coming back like a bad sequel? Because they are intended to scare the public and apportion blame.
The subtext is always the same: if the mother had only done X (or avoided Y), her child wouldn’t be autistic. If you’d made different choices, your child would be different.
That storyline feeds a culture of fear and maternal blame. It’s preying on every pregnant person’s worst nightmare: that something they are doing (or not doing) will harm their unborn child.
And while I’m all for caution – as mothers we avoid blue cheese, paté, caffeine, alcohol and sushi for exactly that reason – there is a fine line.
Real caution is listening to the kind of advice that’s grounded in evidence. That means following NHS guidance, using paracetamol prudently when needed, and talking to your clinician.
What is autism?
Autism is a condition that someone is born with and essentially means their brain works in a different way to neurotypical people’s.
As the NHS website says: ‘Autism is not a medical condition with treatments or a “cure”‘. However, autistic people can be supported to help them in their day-to-day lives.
Autism is a spectrum and there is no standard definition of what a diagnosis will look like for any one person.
The NHS explains that ‘nobody knows what causes autism, or if it has a cause.’ It can affect members of the same family, ‘so it may sometimes be passed on to a child by their parents’.
Find out more here
Going on ‘vibes’ or because it benefits a political narrative, is absolutely not the right course of action.
Nor is the decision for the FDA to approve leucovorin – a drug traditionally used to protect cancer patients against toxicity from chemotherapy – as treatment for children with autism when researchers have cautioned that the science is still in the very early stages and that more work is needed before any firm conclusions can be reached.
Let’s also be frank, this ongoing witch hunt into a cause stems from society’s misunderstanding of autism.
When political figures suggest that paracetamol causes autism and the supposed ‘leader of the free world’ refers to autism as a ‘horrible crisis’, it doesn’t just spread misinformation, it feeds into the narrative that autistic people are a problem to be prevented when we aren’t.
Autistic people are just people. We’re your colleagues, your neighbours, the business owners you hire, the parents at school pick-up and the strangers you pass in the street.
We may have different communication styles, skills and preferences to non-autistic people, but that doesn’t mean we should have to constantly defend our right to exist, or be treated like a tragedy to be avoided at all costs.
Claims, like the ones RFK Jr made in April, that children with autism will ‘never pay taxes’, will ‘never hold a job’, ‘never play baseball’, ‘write a poem’, ‘go out on a date’ or ‘will never use a toilet unassisted’, aren’t just unfounded, but are completely untrue for many autistics around the world.
I run businesses that support neurodivergent adults, all of them are people who are clever, kind, and often exhausted by a world that wasn’t built for their brains. Yet each one of us persists.
Autism doesn’t need a culprit. It needs understanding, accessibility and support.
Instead of chasing a mythical cause that does nothing but stigmatise, we can choose to build a world that accommodates neurodivergent minds in schools, workplaces and healthcare.
That’s the future I’m working towards. The one where we, as a society, help autistic and ADHD adults get the support they deserve. A world where my child is seen for who they are and where I don’t have to explain, yet again, that something didn’t ‘cause’ me to be this way.
If leaders want to make an big announcement about autism, try this: commit to evidence-based healthcare, fund support services, and stop treating our existence like a public health emergency to be solved.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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