U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. discusses the findings of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey, during a press conference at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 16, 2025. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
On September 21, at a memorial packed with roughly 90,000 people, President Donald Trump stepped onto the stage to honor late activist Charlie Kirk — but soon shifted gears entirely. What began as a tribute morphed into a bold preview: Trump told the crowd that on the following day his administration would unveil “one of the biggest announcements, really medically, I think, in the history of our country.”
The claim: Tylenol use during pregnancy raised the risk for autism.
Though the administration framed the announcement as a consensus breakthrough in a decades-long search to understand the causes of autism, the backlash from the medical community was swift. Researchers characterized the evidence as limited and said the administration had made the common error of assuming just because two things are related, that one must cause the other — “correlation without causation.”
An intense wave of public scrutiny began. By November 2025, a comprehensive umbrella review published in the British Medical Journal soon pulled together data from 40 observational studies and nine earlier reviews and concluded, as dozens of studies and other meta-analyses had, that there is no clear evidence that acetaminophen use during pregnancy causes autism.
With ongoing public statements from public health officials calling for precaution, the debate has transformed into a cultural and politically-loaded controversy.
The exact criteria required for a diagnosis of the genetic disorder autism have varied over the years, with requirements growing broader over time, explained Neuropsychologist Dr. Susan Bookheimer, co-director of UCLA’s Center for Autism Research & Treatment before her retirement earlier this year. Having autism may impact someone a great deal, or not at all.
“When it was first described, the primary features for what we would now call ‘profound autism’ would have been a severe deficit in social communication,” Bookheimer said. “The definition has broadened over the years.”
Ever since the beginning of autism research, misinformation surrounding the diagnosis has run rampant. In the 1940s, child psychiatrist Leo Kanner theorized that the condition was caused by “refrigerator mothers”— mothers lacking an emotional connection with their children — a theory he came to recant. Bookheimer said this belief created a “great stigma,” as parents did not want to be blamed for their children’s diagnoses.
A half-century later, claims surrounding the cause of autism continued to swirl. In 1998, one such hypothesis — now repeatedly disproven by accredited analysis — claimed vaccines were linked to autism.
“As it turns out, the person who first posed that idea had proposed it on the basis of only nine cases,” Bookheimer said, “the majority of whom were later [examined] by others and found not to have autism.” Over time, even more came into focus, including a hidden incentive.
“This particular individual actually had a financial stake in alternatives to vaccines — so he later lost his medical license, but unfortunately, that story got out,” Bookheimer said. “Now, nevertheless, it’s been studied in great detail, and no study has come out showing a link between autism and vaccines, despite a lot of sincere work trying to find a relationship.”
Dr. Dana Futoran, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, served as the medical director of an adolescent psychiatric hospital and now works at a teen residential program — treating many patients on the autism spectrum. Futoran said that fears of vaccinations have led to increased diagnoses of avoidable diseases such as measles.
Many of Futoran’s patients’ families have searched for treatments for their children’s autism, which she said has led to some unorthodox and potentially harmful requests, including leucovorin — a treatment recommended by the Trump administration — and iron chelation treatment, neither of which Futoran was familiar with before they were suggested.
“Families are desperate to find something — some cause or some treatment. It’s scary because we just don’t know what the cause of autism is yet. We know it’s complex. There’s a lot of different genes that have been identified as possibilities. So there’s not just one gene or one cause,” Futoran said. “There could be some environmental factors, but we don’t know yet. It’s a big unknown.”
Earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had pledged to find the cause of autism by September. In this speech, Kennedy asserted that there must be an “environmental toxin” causing autism, citing increasing autism diagnoses to support his point.
“This is a preventable disease. We know it’s an environmental exposure. It has to be,” Kennedy said in a news conference. “Genes do not cause epidemics.”
The speech quickly garnered anger. Above all, much of Kennedy’s terminology proved controversial. Futoran and Bookheimer agreed that “epidemic” implies that the rates have increased drastically, when in actuality, the criteria to qualify for autism have become a lot looser. For example, Futoran said a diagnosis used to include a significant speech delay and more “severe” disabilities. Now, autism is viewed as a “spectrum,” with some autistic people possessing visible symptoms while others have a milder experience.
“The rates of diagnosis have increased drastically because we are now broadening our definition and it’s no longer limited to that rather small subset of individuals who have autism as we would have described it 50 years ago,” Bookheimer said. “It’s incorrect to call it an ‘epidemic’ as if something is spreading.”
About five months after Kennedy’s pledge, the administration made their Tylenol announcement. Bookheimer said that several studies have looked into this topic, but only one found Tylenol to show a “very small effect” possibly related to autism. Futoran expressed concern that misinterpretation may lead pregnant people to hesitate before taking Tylenol when experiencing symptoms such as a high fever — while fever itself has been definitively proven to be linked to autism.
“There has been a potential association in some studies that women who used Tylenol frequently or just in high doses may have had an increased risk of having a child with autism, but that doesn’t mean the Tylenol caused it,” Futoran said. “Association is not causation. The women that were more likely to take the Tylenol may have had an autoimmune disease or some infection or a fever that may have been linked to autism.”
Bookheimer noted that a “cure” is likely not possible — at least any time soon. She stated that autism cannot be cured because, despite Kennedy’s words, it is not a “disease.” She hopes that one day there can be treatments to help those on the autism spectrum with issues such as sensory over-responsivity, which she studied during her time at UCLA.
As noted by Archer School Learning Specialist Danit Kaya, about 20% of the student body identifies as neurodiverse — a population that Learning Specialist Stephanie Wald said risks feeling ostracized or ashamed of their identity when misinformation rises.
“It might make students feel othered or feel like something was done to cause who they are. They just are who they are because of how they were born, and there isn’t a vaccine or Tylenol being used that caused it, and there have been many studies that have disproved that,” Wald said. “Somebody saying that [a student’s diagnosis was caused by vaccines or Tylenol] doesn’t make it true.”
Freshman Lucy Dinerstein is the leader of the Neurodiverse Student Club. She said that seeing misinformation being spread by the current administration is upsetting, especially because it feels like progress is being reversed.
“It’s putting such a negative connotation on something that already had such a negative connotation, and it’s just supporting the stigma,” Dinerstein said.
To support autistic people and combat falsehoods, Dinerstein suggests consuming media that centers autistic voices, such as the TV series “Atypical” and “Extraordinary Attorney Woo.” She also said she and the Neurodiverse Student Club plan on presenting to the student body to help educate them on important topics, such as misinformation.
“We have differences in our brains, so we can come up with thoughts and ideas that other people can’t,” Dinerstein said. “Trump’s administration is just not fostering that, and it’s not lifting neurodivergency up.”
This article was originally published in The Oracle on November 9, 2025.