On Monday, the president, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Studies Administrator Mehmet Oz, and other top officials at the NIH and FDA presented their promised conclusions regarding the cause and treatment of autism.
As I watched the top science and health officials of our nation flank the president, I was worried that given Kennedy’s well-documented hatred of vaccines, things might not go well. I was right to worry. Things went as badly as they possibly could have gone. The big autism reveal was a total disaster.
The announcement on autism was the saddest display of a lack of evidence, rumors, recycled old myths, lousy advice, outright lies, and dangerous recommendations by anyone in authority in the world claiming to know anything about science that I have ever witnessed. And that’s saying something, since I’m 76 years old. Among other things, I watched Trump gurgle on about taking bleach during Covid.
The president said he was convinced that the U.S. is in the throes of an autism epidemic and the cause was pregnant women using Tylenol for pain relief and fever control. That is a dangerous dud. Doctors have been watching for a link between Tylenol and health problems in fetuses for at least a decade. Well-designed studies find no causal link.
But Trump did not stop there. He flat-out told pregnant women not to take Tylenol despite the fact that it is the safest option for battling fevers. He instead offered this advice: “Tough it out.” It is a well-known fact that fever is a real risk to a fetus, including birth defects, spina bifida, and miscarriage. All Trump did was put fetuses at risk and make moms who took Tylenol feel guilty. Kennedy’s agreement was no surprise, but incredibly, the actual doctors in the room just smiled and nodded in agreement like doltish bobbleheads.
But Trump went on. Kids get too many vaccines — adding up to 80, he claimed — and the hepatitis B shot prevents a sexually transmitted disease so wait to vaccine your kid until they are 14. The misinformation being spewed again hit the deadly advice mark. Hepatitis B can go from mom to baby at birth, and people might get 80 vaccines only in a lifetime. This presidential vaccine ranting opened the door for Kennedy to then shout out his usual anti-vax rhetoric, including that the NIH and CDC had been totally corrupt until he slithered on to the scene.
There is no point in refuting the entire flood of nonsense released during this pathetic event. What has to be said is that given this performance, given the unhinged behavior of Kennedy, given the president’s total lack of knowledge about health and science, and given the sycophantic behavior of his top medical and science officials, one thing is clear: Americans cannot trust their government. The HHS, FDA, NIH, CDC and executive branch have collectively jumped the public health shark.
We have seen in history ideology used to drive science to confirm the prejudices of dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. But we now have a regime that sees science as an enemy and public health as only fit for personal anecdotes and conspiracy. The Trump administration’s approach to science policy is hide or not collect crucial data, then leave medical care advice to ill-informed, fringe media influencers peddling goop, nostrums, elixirs, and potions.
American science is now the laughingstock of the world: visas for top scientists and students canceled, research grants blindly cut, important topics for research banned, political appointees with hardly any qualifications running most health and science agencies, databases wiped, scientists fired, and uncomfortable peer-reviewed reports buried.
How did this happen? How did a nation that once revered its scientists, doctors, and inventors put into power a regime that hates them and prefers to simply make stuff up? Covid is partly to blame.
The pandemic that killed millions terrified the globe. The nation with the best scientists and doctors was seen as unable to stop the dying without restrictions on freedom, schooling, travel, socializing and mandates that were hated. Our experts could not and still can’t tell us why the pandemic happened. Their messaging shifted.
The backlash came in the form of Trump, in his second term, appointing an utterly inept man to run federal health and science and appoint others who see science as having failed the nation. Trump also advances religion, feelings, and alternative medicines as better weapons in the battle for health.
The big autism reveal was the culmination of the nation’s anger toward science. Nonsense had a fine time while truth was kept out of the room.
However, the anger is misplaced, and the anti-science backlash will prove fatal.
Pollution, pandemics, climate change, drought, resource depletion, obesity, and other threats can only be accurately perceived and managed by science. Medicine and science will, if funded, find answers for autism, heart disease, cancer, birth defects, mental illness and diabetes. Presidents, lawyers, and bureaucratic toadies will not.
The big reveal on autism confirms that no one should put their faith in federal science. Americans must turn to their doctors, the professional societies of medicine, the vetted websites of real scientists, and foreign sources for sound information about autism and other health matters. There is nothing even close to trustworthy emanating from anyone with a federal appointment and a scientific-sounding platform.
Arthur Caplan is head of the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.