‘Public Health Whiplash’: RFK Jr.’s Renewed Autism Plans Stoke Fresh Fears
Amid Trump’s calls to ID and institutionalize people with psychiatric disabilities, HHS revives a second discredited theory of autism’s cause.
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Updated Sept. 22, 2025
Saying autism is “among the most alarming public health crises in history,” President Donald Trump Monday announced that pregnant women’s use of acetaminophen, the pain reliever often sold under the brand name Tylenol, is a cause of the neurodevelopmental condition.
“To have families destroyed over this is just terrible,” Trump said at a press conference, flanked by public health officials. “Don’t take it, just don’t take it.”
Most pregnant women, including those with high fevers, should avoid the drug and “tough it out,” he added.
An of existing research found children whose mothers took acetaminophen were more likely to be autistic than other babies. The scientists who conducted the analysis were careful to say that there is no evidence that the drug causes the condition. have had mixed results or discounted a cause and effect.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will immediately start the process of updating the over-the-counter analgesic’s safety label, said Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Federal officials will also seek approval for leucovorin, a form of folic acid sometimes prescribed off-label to treat autism. Evidence it works is scant.
“Our collective body of global research going back decades means that we have encyclopedic knowledge about the risks for autism, its possible causes and the highly variable experience of autistic individuals,” members of the Coalition of Autism Scientists said in a statement reacting to the administration’s announcement. “The data cited do not support the claim that Tylenol causes autism and leucovorin is a cure, and only stoke fear and falsely suggest hope when there is no simple answer.”
The president also urged parents to forgo giving their newborns the Hepatitis B vaccine, insisting inaccurately that the infection is transmitted only by sex. Trump also suggested, contrary to , that autism is not diagnosed in Amish people and Cubans — something he wrongly attributed to members of the religious sect eschewing vaccinations and his belief that people in Cuba can’t afford acetaminophen.
Trump said he and Kennedy first discussed the idea that autism is “artificially induced” 20 years ago. “It’s turning out that we understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it, we think.”
As the clock ticks down on Robert F. Kennedy’s self-imposed deadline to identify and reveal a supposed cause of autism, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department secretary has stoked fresh fears within the disability community.
In April, Kennedy promised that he would spearhead a “massive testing and research effort” that would establish autism’s cause “.” The study has yet to materialize, but in recent days the secretary has made statements that one researcher called “another round of ‘autism-cause roulette.’ ”
The churn “is creating public health whiplash” that may “derail the search for the actual truth,”Jessica Steier, CEO of — an organization of medical and public health specialists — recently told a group of journalists.
At a heated Sept. 4 , Kennedy repeated misinformation about vaccines, which he has long blamed for what he calls an “epidemic” of autism, despite dozens of studies to the contrary.
The following day, the Wall Street Journal reported he was planning to release a report blaming pregnant women’s use of acetaminophen and low maternal levels of a form of the vitamin folic acid as autism’s root cause — a link mainstream scientists were .
The effort to blame acetaminophen sparked an angry backlash among disability advocates, who noted a painful history of attempting to attribute autism to poor parenting, including the supposed indifference of emotionally frosty “refrigerator mothers.”
Then, on Sept. 9, the department released “,” a 20-page report that said Kennedy has told the National Institutes of Health to move forward with compiling a massive database of medical and pharmacy records, insurance claims and even information generated by apps. The database will be used to research numerous conditions, including autism.
President Donald Trump and Kennedy have given fresh fuel to longstanding fears that disease registries might be used to identify autistic people for forced sterilization, institutionalization and even death. Such a list was used by Nazi officials to identify children to be sent to “euthanasia clinics.”
Until the 1970s, similar lists were used to identify Americans to be subjected to forced sterilization and institutionalization. As a result, autism advocacy groups are often split on whether to recommend families participate in research that collects genetic or medical information.
In a urging civil commitment of homeless people and individuals with mental illnesses, Trump ordered federal housing and health officials to collect data on people who should be targeted. On Sunday, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade apologized for declaring on air that people who are mentally ill and unhoused should be subject to “.”
An overwhelming majority of scientists agree that autism is a naturally occurring neurotype and not a mental illness. But because their needs frequently go unmet, autistic people often struggle with anxiety, depression and other conditions.
Even as Trump has declared autism “” and Kennedy claimed it “,” the administration has slashed tens of millions of dollars in funding for efforts to improve autistic people’s lives, Medicaid and other programs that people with disabilities rely on.
In an essay published in The New York Times last month, Steier Kennedy and other officials have used to counter the avalanche of evidence disproving a link between vaccines and autism. Since 1998, 70 studies have looked for such a connection.
Of 26 that purported to establish a link, 18 were written by David and Mark Geier, a Maryland father-and-son team who were cited by medical authorities for performing dangerous experiments on autistic children and whose work was routinely rejected by scholarly journals. Kennedy has assigned David Geier — who was disciplined in 2011 for practicing medicine without a license — in HHS’ new search for a cause.
The other eight studies that found a link were retracted or discredited.
Kennedy has received in referral fees and profits from law firms suing vaccine manufacturers.
Research has found no link between autism and acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, Steier told reporters last week. One recent Swedish study of 2.5 million children included 186,000 who had been exposed to the painkiller. The babies were 5% to 7% more likely than the other children studied to have ADHD or autism, but an analysis involving their neurotypical siblings disproved any causal relationship, she said.
But five days after the Senate hearing, and about two weeks after Trump publicly pressed Kennedy about his deadline for identifying autism’s cause, The Atlantic published a story quoting William Parker, an immunologist whose efforts to publish papers supposedly establishing a link have been routinely rebuffed by mainline journals. Parker said he had spoken to Kennedy five times in recent weeks and met on Zoom with National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya.
Parker, the magazine reported, was elated. “Nothing was happening and — boom!” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
Even as Kennedy perseveres, advocates are critical of his stance toward autistic people, says Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. She is among those who were disappointed to see the secretary redouble his efforts to create a “disease registry” mixing public and private data that medical privacy laws have kept separate.
When the plan for the new, sweeping federal dataset was first announced in April, Bhattacharya tried to allay fears by promising it would adhere to “state-of-the-art” privacy protections, but did not specify what those are. Privacy experts at the Brookings Institution and elsewhere say there is no legal roadmap to doing what Kennedy proposes.
Unlike many other agencies, the NIH is not bound by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, the main law that restricts who can access private medical information. Instead, NIH to the Privacy Act of 1974, which puts strict limits on the collection of personally identifiable information.
Uproar notwithstanding, Kennedy’s new report did not clarify how individual medical records would be protected. Repeated requests for comment from HHS went unanswered.
According to a report , people typically have no idea they will have little or no control over whether their health insurer or the maker of a wearable fitness tracker will sell or otherwise mine their data for commercial purposes.
“Under the Trump administration’s plan, user health data would flow directly into an unregulated ecosystem of third-party apps where sensitive health details could be , or even cross-referenced with ,” the report warns. “In effect, the initiative centralizes some of the nation’s most sensitive records, while simultaneously lowering or ignoring guardrails that have long protected them.”
Gross says she thinks it is unlikely NIH is compiling a registry that identifies autists. But instead of allaying concerns, Kennedy has pushed people with disabilities out of the conversation and eliminated research into their priorities.
The federal office that brings together autistic people, scholars and representatives of numerous cabinet departments to set research priorities, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, has not been active since Kennedy’s appointment, Gross says. HHS did not respond to questions about the committee’s status.
Earlier this year, her organization lost a grant to collaborate on addressing longstanding and widely acknowledged gender bias and ableism in diagnosing autistic people by using a questionnaire asking about their experiences, rather than others’ subjective impressions.
“It was a really promising project, and it was pretty far along,” says Gross.
During the first four months of the year, at least $31 million, or 26%, was cut from NIH’s autism research budget. many of the reductions were made to adhere to executive orders on “gender ideology.”
“We haven’t even gotten to what is the utility of doing this,” Gross says, regarding ongoing efforts to resuscitate disproven theories. “How is this going to improve the lives of autistic people?”
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