This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and this is how President Trump's autism announcement is going over in the autism community.

This is just, they're just, it's absurd. It's absurd!

What Trump's tirade against Tylenol means for pregnant women and parenting writ large after a quick break. Stick with us.

Okay, so I wanna get right into this today. CNN medical correspondent, Meg Tirell is here. Thanks for being here, Meg.

Thank you for having me.

So on Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump came out with his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And other administration officials to make a big announcement about autism. What exactly did they say?

So the seeds for this were really planted five months ago in a cabinet meeting where RFK Jr. Made this just staggering pronouncement, essentially that they were going to identify the cause of what he calls the autism epidemic by September. And just the idea that suddenly we'd magically have this answer in five months that a lot of different scientists and researchers have been working on for a long time and have been finding increasingly is likely a complex mixture of things, was sort of hard to swallow for a lot of people. Now it's September and now we have this press conference where the administration is touting what they say is a cause of autism. And we'd seen some reporting leading into this. So we knew essentially what to expect, which was that they were gonna focus in on acetaminophen or the active ingredient in Tylenol, the painkiller and fever reducer. This is a medicine that's been around forever. It's one of the most recognized brand names in the world. It's widely used. And specifically, they were gonna focus on its use during pregnancy.

Thank you very much. So I've been waiting for this meeting for 20 years, actually.

So we didn't know exactly how the administration was going to approach this. The data that we had seen on this was very mixed, and experts have been warning, this is certainly not a proven causal link between use of Tylenol in pregnancy and autism.

First, effective immediately, the FDA will be notifying physicians at the use of acetaminophen, which is basically commonly known as Tylenol during pregnancy can be associated with a very increased risk of autism.

And when the president came out...

Taking Tylenol.

You almost saw is he made this decision. He's like, I'm just going to say it.

Alright, I'll say it. It's not good.

Don't take Tylenol, you know? And it was this really strong pronouncement coming from the President of the United States.

But with Tylenol, don't take it.

Over and over again that pregnant women should not take Tylenol.

And if you can't live, if your fever is so bad, you have to take one because there's no alternative to that. Sadly, first question, what can you take instead? It's actually there's not an alternative to that.

And then he started to kind of go into, unless you've got a really high fever and you can't tough it out. And it just goes against everything that we know from the research and from medicine.

A doctor, but I'm giving my opinion.

HHS also says it's going to launch a nationwide public service campaign to inform families and protect public health. We don't know exactly what that's going look like yet. And then there was another part of this announcement where they talked about a potential treatment for autism. And this isn't related to Tylenol, but it's a approved drug called Leucovorin, which is a generic medicine now that's mainly used to sort of counteract the harmful effects of chemotherapy. There have been some small studies in a subset of patients with autism or with similar characteristics to autism spectrum disorder, showing that this drug, which is essentially a version of a B vitamin, folinic acid, can be helpful, particularly when it comes to children who have language delays or who are considered nonverbal. So this is a complicated part of this announcement and because The FDA is moving essentially to approve this old drug for this new use, based on small studies that we currently have. Pretty unusual to see this approved based on the amount of data we've seen.

Well, so let's break this down. First of all, is it true that we are seeing more autism diagnoses?

'It is true that the rate of autism diagnoses has gone up over the past few decades. In the year 2000, the rate was about one in 150 children. And then in the most recent update we got from the CDC that had gone to one in 31 children. And so when you look at that, you say, wow, that is a big increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism. But it's really important to look behind those numbers and to understand what's going on in society. And one thing is that in 2013, there was a change in the way autism is characterized in the DSM-5, the big manual of how we diagnose these kinds of things. And it broadened the definition of autism. There's also been more awareness. And in many ways, people say it's a good thing that we are diagnosing more kids with autism because they can receive the kinds of services that can help them. So, you know, I think even the question of whether we're in a, quote, autism epidemic, I think a lot of groups might take issue with.

And what have we understood up until this point about what causes it? You said it was probably a complex web of things, right?

Absolutely. So experts say that there are a lot of genetic factors that have been identified that play into autism diagnoses. You often see these kinds of things run in families. And there could be an interplay between genetics and environmental factors as well. And so there was a lot concern that saying, okay, it's this one thing, we've solved it. A kind of blame on mothers and families saying, you did this thing and you didn't tough it out, the way the president talked about how pregnant women should just get through high fever and that they're to blame for their autism diagnosis.

Ideally, a woman won't take Tylenol. And on the vaccines, it would be good, instead of one visit where they pump the baby, load it up with stuff, you'll do it over a period of four times or five times. I was...

And vaccines, we've said on this show multiple times that there's been no evidence that vaccines cause autism. And yet Trump was drifting into that territory on Monday as well.

Yeah, we didn't even expect to hear about vaccines at this press conference. Of course, that was an initial concern when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Brought this up back in April because he has made statements before saying he believes there is a link between vaccines and autism. Studies have shown that rates of autism are similar between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. So our friend Dr. Sanjay Gupta often says, we don't know exactly what causes autism, but we know that vaccines don't. So there were just a lot of things that raised questions there.

Well, so I want to dig into the Tylenol part of this. Like we said, a lot of people use it. A lot of pregnant women use it and Trump over and over again was very clear. He said, do not take it, that it's dangerous, that pregnant women should just tough it out, that there's no downside to not taking it. Is that true?

Fever during pregnancy itself, if left untreated, can be dangerous both to the developing fetus and to the pregnant woman. So Tylenol has been relied upon because other pain relievers and fever reducers have shown proven safety risks during pregnancy. And so Tylenal is one of the only things that you can take. So the idea that there is no downside, I think doctors are pretty concerned that pregnant women may think they have to suffer through. A high fever, which could then be detrimental to them and their developing baby.

Well then why is Trump so fixated on it as it relates to autism? Has a link been studied before?

The link has been studied between Tylenol use in pregnancy and autism for more than a decade and the science is inconclusive. And there's this one study that people have really been focused on. It came out about a month ago and it was a review of previously done studies, 46 studies looking at this issue. And those researchers concluded that their were more studies showing an association between Tylenol in pregnancy and autism than there were not showing an Association. But they concluded they couldn't prove a causal link. The data don't show that one thing causes the other. And the way to think about this is you're taking Tylenols because you have a fever or you have pain. So then if you subsequently have a child with autism, does that mean the Tylenyl caused the autism? Does it mean the thing that caused the fever or the pain caused the Autism? Or does it mean that something completely unrelated contributed to the autism? And we don't have the answers to that.

It's the old saying, correlation does not equal causation.

A favorite of health reporters.

Today, the FDA will issue a physician's notice about the risk of acetaminophen during pregnancy and begin the process to initiate a safety label change.

'And we should say major medical groups are not recommending changes to the way pregnant women use Tylenol. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Society for Fetal and Maternal Medicine, even the European Medicines Agency, which is essentially Europe's version of the FDA, put out a statement saying use of paracetamol, which is their version of acetaminophen, during pregnancy unchanged in the EU, saying there was no new data to support this. If you go to Tylenol's website, it greets you with a pop-up that says, we stand with science and we stand with you. Oh, wow. And they know Tylenal is one of the most studied medications in history. They say, the facts remain unchanged. Over a decade of rigorous research endorsed by leading medical professionals confirm there's no credible evidence linking acetaminophen to autism.

So that's a pretty wild snapshot of where we are, a major company saying that what the president of the United States just went on TV to say about our drug is not true.

That's right. And you have to wonder what further action they take. We've asked them. We see a lot of pressure on companies from President Trump. And this one is firmly in his crosshairs. I'm not sure if he intended for that to be the case, but we're going to have to see what they do.

We gotta take a quick break, but when we come back, that blame Meg was talking about earlier, this mother has felt it.

My son is autistic, he is just about to turn 25. He is what you would call a high support autistic, meaning that he needs a responsible person around at all times. He is hilarious and delightful.

'This is Shannon Rosa. She's a mother of three, including her son Leo, who was diagnosed with autism when he was just three years old. Shannon is also the senior editor and co-founder of Thinking Persons Guide to Autism, which is a hub for information aimed at and written by autistic people, parents, and experts. Shannon said at the time Leo was diagnosed in 2003, a place like that just didn't exist. Instead, she was being bombarded with all kinds of negative messages in the media about autism. That she should be scared, that her son would be a burden and never fit in. She says she blamed herself for his diagnosis.

I went into a pretty bad depression because not only was I getting these awful messages about my son's future, but the medical and professional industry around autism didn't really have anything helpful to offer me other than speech therapy and a process called ABA therapy, which... Said it could help my son be a normal child and these supplement and pseudoscience doctors who said they could help me son be in normal child. So in the absence of anything productive or helpful, I went to the people who were offering to help me.

One of those people was Andrew Wakefield. He wrote a big paper in 1998, claiming there was a link between vaccines and autism, and that view took hold within the autism community. Wakefield has since lost his medical license and his paper was retracted, but the damage was done.

I am not proud of this, but I did stop vaccinating my autistic child. And when I had another child four years after he was born, I didn't vaccinate them at all. But I will say that once I learned what the actual science was on vaccines and autism, The fact that not only is there no link. But, you know, autism is nothing to fear. Autistic people deserve vaccines and health too. All my children were quickly caught up with their vaccines and they're all fully vaccinated. In fact, my son and I just went and got our flu vaccines together last week.

I want to turn to this announcement from President Trump and more generally how they've been talking about all this. When you hear these officials describe autism as something that destroys families or is hard to watch, suggests that autistic people will never hold the job or lead a fulfilling happy life, how does that make you feel?

Oh, it makes me feel furious because it takes us back 20 years to where we were after the Wakefield announcement. I mean, that's the kind of narrative we were getting then. And whether or not you can hold a job, you know, like my son, he might never hold a job but he is still a worthy human being who deserves rights. I mean anybody can become disabled at any time. It's it's just this whole fear of autism that is unwarranted and is the biggest roadblock we really have to overcome and to see people who don't have any link to it, who don t understand it and especially somebody like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Whose Aunt Rosemary was the inspiration for starting the Special Olympics come out and with this kind of ableist nonsense against disabled people stroking fear instead of doing what his Health and Human Services agency should be doing, which is to work on more services and supports and better diagnoses so the people whose health are under his ages can live better lives, it's a full on betrayal.

Even if you put aside the science of this announcement, which experts have said is questionable at best, I guess I'm struck by how it seems to be saying to pregnant mothers, you could be doing harm by putting acetaminophen or Tylenol in your body, and you better do your due diligence and be careful, otherwise you might have an autistic child. I know they haven't explicitly said that, but it does seem to be implied that the burden is on the parents instead of whatever mix of circumstances might have. Led to the condition, what do you make of that idea?

It's just it's not new. The refrigerator theory mother of autism has been around for decades blaming mothers for being cold and distant and causing autism in their kids. And I can tell you the one thing that people haven't been talking about in this that I think is actually the most significant factor in having an autistic child is having autistic traits yourself or being autistic yourself. They're not looking at the possibility of confounding, which is the idea that autistic women have more pain conditions and need to take more Tylenol, and autistic women have autistic kids. Instead, they're trying to go and blame mothers as they always have when what we're looking at is more likely a matter of inheritance.

The president said, you know, they shouldn't be attacked for asking questions, trying to find answers, trying to move quickly. To be fair, I can't really remember President in recent memory highlighting this issue in such a major way. Is a push from the federal government to do more research, take more action, really a bad thing?

'I think it would be a wonderful thing if they were looking at the right issues. You know, what autistic people want, they want better supports. Our families want more respite. We want better paid home aids so there's not such a high turnover. This, you know, moving fast and breaking things. You know I'm in Silicon Valley. This is not how we approach healthcare. We do it slowly and carefully. And we work with the people who are the stakeholders to make sure that these movements are actually going to help them. Because does it help families like me have a better time when we're out in society and people judge our children for things that they cannot help? No, it does not. Does it help my son with things like his chronic headaches, which may or may not be tied into his autistic repetitive behaviors and anxiety? No, It does not! We should be working on. What we've been doing which is fine-tuning the diagnostic criteria so we find more autistic people who aren't young white boys. We find more adults. One of the things that they said during the announcement was that there were no autistic people over 50. Donald Triplett who is the first person I diagnosed with autism in the United States, he died recently. He was in his 80s. You know, this is just, they're just, it's absurd. It's absurd, I'm Does that answer your question? This is... Yesterday was a big day

I can sense your frustration without a doubt. And one of the themes of the administration has kind of been parental choice, whether it's education or some of this health stuff that parents should do research, make choices on how that research kind of aligns with their values and their views. What's wrong with that? You went on a journey in that respect, right, of evaluating the information and making choices.

Absolutely. Parents should be responsible for educating themselves, but I don't think they should be responsible for doing their own research into matters in which they don't have expertise. That's why we have experts. You know, you need to be able to have the ability to be discerning about the information that you choose and not just choose it because somebody scared you into it or because a social media influencer made you mad or scared.

So what advice do you have for pregnant mothers or parents of autistic children, such as yourself? I know people want a simple answer, but it sure doesn't seem like there is one. So as someone who is devoted to sifting through misinformation, false claims, how should they approach this kind of stuff?

Well, I think that for the most part, they can trust their pediatricians on things like acetaminophen, knowing that acetaminophene is safe. The studies are, I mean, this is solid science. They can trust, there are pediatricians on this. It's really hard to have to say, don't listen to the government's health agency, but that's where we are. But again, you asked about pregnant moms. I think they need to most of all learn and somehow understand that disability is something that is natural and could happen to anybody. And they need to prepare themselves for the possibility of that anything could happen to their child, not in a negative way but just in terms of like being ready to accept whatever kind of child they have and look for the information that will help them live their best lives. Being afraid of having an autistic child is understandable, given the climate around autism. But if you learn how best to support your autistic child, if that's what you end up having, then your life can be a wonderful one. I mean, you know, in the midst of all of this nonsense that was happening yesterday, my son and I, we went to our local disability center and swam for an hour in the local warm disability pool with other disabled people. And had a lovely day and my son was joyful and smiling and I was thinking what a good life we have. And if I was only focused on what we didn't have, then that would not be possible.

Shannon Rosa is the senior editor of Thinking Person's Guide to Autism. That's all for us today. We're back on Sunday. I'll talk to you then. Thank you for listening.