In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio. A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa. He is also pushing other questionable theories.
For nearly a decade, the immunologist and biochemist William Parker has tried, with little success, to persuade other scientists to take seriously his theory that acetaminophen—better known by the brand name Tylenol—is the primary cause of autism. Researchers have long failed to find a causal link between autism and any medication, and these days, most of them believe that a change in diagnostic criteria is largely behind the dramatic uptick in autism rates over the past 30 years. But late last month, Parker received a phone call from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wanted to learn more about his work. In fact, he’s heard from Kennedy several times since then. Parker also spoke recently with Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health. To hear Parker tell it, the nation’s top health officials have taken great interest in his ideas.Over the past few weeks, Kennedy has reportedly been looking into an alleged connection between autism and Tylenol use during pregnancy. Parker’s preoccupation is slightly different: He believes that children’s use of Tylenol causes autism. Parker has for years operated on the fringes of academia. He runs his own small, independent laboratory, which he started after he lost a lab at Duke University’s medical school. (Duke did not renew Parker’s contract after he began focusing on autism in his research, though an email that an administrator sent to Parker in 2021, which I reviewed, said only that keeping the lab open wasn’t in his department’s “strategic best interest.”) Parker’s attempts to publish in academic journals have regularly been rebuffed. One reviewer tore into a recent submission from Parker, writing in their assessment that his hypothesis was “outrageous” and “illogical”; the paper was rejected. The past couple of weeks have been a wild reversal for Parker. “Nothing was happening and—boom!” he told me. “It’s beautiful.”
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Parker acknowledges that his work has not been embraced by mainstream autism researchers. Viktor Ahlqvist, the author of a 2024 Swedish study that concluded that acetaminophen use during pregnancy was not associated with autism, told me that developmental outcomes in early life are “notoriously difficult to study,” and that many apparent correlations—say, acetaminophen use and autism—don’t hold up to scrutiny. When I asked Parker to give me the names of scientists who support his theory, he couldn’t think of anyone. (He said Kennedy asked him for names too.) I contacted several longtime autism researchers, none of whom had heard of Parker. His 2023 paper trumpeting the dangers of acetaminophen has been cited a mere 11 times, according to Google Scholar. (By contrast, a 2007 paper Parker wrote on beneficial bacteria in the appendix has been cited 500 times.) For someone who is 99.99 percent certain he knows what causes autism and how to end it, Parker has hardly made a mark.
Allison Parshall at Scientific American:
For acetaminophen, for example, researchers can’t fully separate the effects of the medication from the effects of the underlying conditions that may lead people to take pain relievers during pregnancy, explains David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry studying autism at the University of Pennsylvania. Overall, “the evidence [from these studies] was really mixed, and the effects were really small,” he says. Acetaminophen is also usually used as a fever reducer, which pregnant people might take if they are fighting an infection. Both infections and uncontrolled fevers during pregnancy have been linked to higher rates of autism. “We know that the neurodevelopmental outcomes of having an uncontrolled fever are worse than what we’re observing for acetaminophen,” Mandell says.
