from the i’m-with-stupid dept
When it comes to RFK Jr., I tend not to find much humor in the chaos he creates. The man’s work involves American health and illness, life and death, so it’s just generally not funny. And that holds true to Kennedy’s wielding of incomplete, inaccurate, and unsettled science to go before all of America and declare definitively that acetaminophen, of which Tylenol is the most famous brand, was at least partially the cause for autism spectrum disorder when expecting mothers took it for pain or fever while pregnant. It wasn’t funny when Trump went to the same microphone and did likewise, stating simply “Don’t take Tylenol” if you’re pregnant. It wasn’t funny when Sinclair decided to abuse its airwaves to disserve the public interest (hey, Brendan Carr, over here!) by spreading even more Tylenol disinformation. And it wasn’t funny when Senator Bill Cassidy took to the airwaves to complain about Kennedy’s nonsense when he was a pivotal voice and vote in confirming Captain Brainworm to head HHS in the first place.
But, I have to admit, this is very funny. See, Texas AG Ken Paxton, a man who I imagine has a Donald Trump body pillow to cuddle with at night, decided to run with the claims Kennedy and Trump made and has filed a lawsuit against the makers of Tylenol for their “deceptive” marketing and labeling practices for Tylenol.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the maker of Tylenol, Kenvue and Johnson & Johnson, who previously sold Tylenol, claiming that they have been “deceptively marketing Tylenol” knowing that it “leads to a significantly increased risk of autism and other disorders.”
To back that claim, Paxton relies on the “considerable body of evidence… recently highlighted by the Trump Administration.”
Specifically Trump and Kennedy’s claims about Tylenol, actually. See, this is already funny. Here’s one passage from the suit itself, the entirety of which is embedded below.
There are many examples of drugs regulated by the Food and Drug Administration that include complete information regarding risks on their labels even when the underlying science—unlike here—is not fully settled. These labels reflect the aims of the regulatory system, which recognizes States’ authority to require warnings to inform consumers of certain risks. Pregnant women should be provided with complete information so that they can make informed decisions regarding the risks to which they expose their unborn children.
So, to start with, regulating OTC drug labels is the responsibility of the FDA. If these companies were not properly including warnings on their standardized labels, the remedy for that is getting the FDA involved, which has regulatory teeth and enforcement mechanisms to declare OTC drugs to be “misbranded.” Tylenol has been around for decades. The idea that this hasn’t been an issue for the better part of a century, but now is, is plainly absurd.
But I want to pay very close attention to Paxton’s claim that warning labels include risks even when the science isn’t settled, but that this isn’t one of those cases. In this case, according to Paxton, the science is settled, making this all the worse.
But that’s all kinds of bullshit. The science here isn’t remotely settled. The scientists of those very studies cited by Paxton have complained about how the administration is drawing conclusions from studies that they are very upfront about being inconclusive. None of Kennedy’s data was “new.” It was merely new analysis of old studies.
Oh, and RFK Jr. came out after Paxton’s lawsuit was filed to tell everyone what we already knew: correlation does not equal causation.
“The causative association between Tylenol given in pregnancy and the perinatal periods is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism,” Kennedy told reporters. “But it’s very suggestive.”
“There should be a cautious approach to it,” he added. “ That’s why our message to patients, to mothers, to people who are pregnant and to the mothers of young children is: Consult your physician.”
That’s always been the message. And that is very funny. Paxton just got pantsed by the very person he cited in his lawsuit, in which he claimed this was all settled science. Even Kennedy, a man capable of saying outrageous things when it comes to healthcare and science, walked this back. And, in doing so, he tore an enormous hole in the lawsuit that Paxton, a Trump bootlicking sycophant, just filed.
Drink that shit in, because it’s delicious.
Now, even Kennedy’s walkback is still bad, of course. He’s acting like this is all more sinister and direct of a relationship than there actually is between autism and Tylenol. “It’s very suggestive” is a line without meaning, scientifically. Suggestive to whom? And to what degree? It’s typical Kennedy, taking outlier studies and pretending they mean much more than they do, even as researchers complain about the methodology of those studies, or their inconclusive nature. He did this with his claim that America’s men are suffering greatly from reduced sperm counts, and now he’s doing it here.
But in a country that could use a good laugh at the moment, I’m not going to pretend like what he did to Paxton isn’t funny.
Filed Under: autism, fda, ken paxton, lawsuits, rfk jr., texas, tylenol
Companies: johnson & johnson
