Episode #23 Deep Dive – RFK Jr.’s Medicine Cabinet Full of Junk Science
A deep dive into this week's episode of Paging America
RFK, Jr. to announce Tylenol causes autism
After promising to reveal “what has caused the autism epidemic” by September, Kennedy plans to announce that the use of acetaminophen (Tylenol) by pregnant people is potentially linked to autism, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said the federal government has not yet started writing a report on the possible causes of autism but reaffirmed a promise that it will be released “within a month.” Says the Journal’s reporting is “premature.”
The Atlantic reports that Kennedy has had multiple calls with the physician who has tried in vain to get others to adopt his belief that acetaminophen causes autism:
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…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.
NBC News reports that, “One of the more robust studies to date, published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that taking acetaminophen during pregnancy was not linked to autism, ADHD or intellectual disability”:
Initially, when researchers looked at the general population, there was a very small increased risk of the disorder in children whose mothers took acetaminophen while pregnant. However, after the researchers compared siblings within the same family — one exposed to the drug during pregnancy, and the other not — they found no link.
In response to the Journal’s reporting, Dr. Alycia Halladay, Chief Science Officer at the Autism Science Foundation released a statement saying, “It is disingenuous and misleading to boil autism’s causes down to one simple thing. We know that autism is incredibly complicated, and we need to move away from studies that simplify it down to one exposure without any other considerations.”
Kenvue, the consumer health spin-off from Johnson & Johnson that makes Tylenol, saw a stock rout that caused the company’s stock to lose billions of dollars in value almost overnight.
Joe Ladapo’s comments on State of the Union with Jake Tapper
On Sunday, Sept. 7, Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo was a guest on State of the Union with Jake Tapper (VIDEO HERE). Tapper grilled him aggressively about his push for Florida to be the first state to eliminate vaccine mandates of any kind, including for school attendance.
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TAPPER: I'm looking at this report from your department from April showing that more people in Florida are seeking religious exemptions for vaccines. And at the same time, Florida is seeing rising cases of hepatitis A and whooping cough and chicken pox. This is in your own report, your own department's report, before you made this decision to try to lift vaccine mandates for Florida, which include, obviously, public schools.
Did your department do any data analysis? Did you do any data projection of how many new cases of these diseases there will be in Florida? Once you remove vaccine mandates?
Ladapo: So absolutely not…There's this conflation of the science and sort of what is the right and wrong thing to do… Again, this whole “Oh, Florida hasn't done any analysis,” that's nonsense.
Tapper: You said you hadn't done any projections.
Ladapo: The way you're portraying it is nonsense. We don't need to do any projections. We handle outbreaks all the time, so there's nothing special that we would need to do.
Red states vs. Blue states on vaccines/Regional CDCs
While Florida moves to eliminate vaccine mandates (with other red states sure to follow), blue states are going in the opposite direction:
Colorado issued orders allowing people to get a COVID vaccination this year without a prescription.
Pennsylvania’s Board of Pharmacy has voted to revise its rules to allow pharmacists to follow the vaccine recommendations of medical authorities other than the CDC.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order to authorize pharmacists to provide the vaccine to almost anyone who wants it without a prescription.
In Massachusetts, the Department of Public Health issued an order last week to ensure that anyone in Massachusetts over the age of 5 can get a COVID-19 booster shot despite federal limitations. The state will also require insurers to pay for the shots.
California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii have formed a west coast public health alliance they say will provide “evidence-based immunization guidance” rooted in “safety, efficacy, and transparency” to ensure residents receive “credible information free from political interference,” according to a statement from California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania have formed a similar alliance on the east coast because, as Boston University School of Public History Professor Matt Motta puts it, they “simply can't trust the recommendations coming from the federal government anymore.” Former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky agrees.
Meanwhile, Dr. Pamela Rockwell, a clinical professor of family medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School who served seven years on ACIP, the independent panel of vaccine experts, is teaming up with other physicians to form a coalition that will essentially be a “shadow CDC”:
She teamed up with a physician who co-chairs the University of Michigan Immunization Committee with her and began to reach out to the heads of local and state organizations like the Michigan Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Michigan Academy of Family Physicians.
"We have been working to establish our own evidence-based recommendations because physicians are confused," said Rockwell.
PEPFAR Defunding
This week’s guest was Dr. Charles Holmes, Director of the Georgetown Center for Innovation in Global Health, Prof of Medicine. Dr. Holmes is a physician, policy leader, and global health strategist with senior experience across government, academia, and philanthropy. He has served as Chief Medical Officer and Deputy U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator for PEPFAR, led large-scale research and programmatic initiatives in Africa, and now directs the Georgetown Center for Innovation in Global Health. His work bridges evidence, diplomacy, and systems reform to advance sustainable access to medicines and health services worldwide.
PEPFAR, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is a global program launched in 2003 under George W. Bush to accelerate progress toward controlling the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It provides lifesaving treatment, care, and prevention services in more than 50 countries, supporting millions of people living with HIV and strengthening health systems for various other health challenges. Overseen by the U.S. Department of State and implemented in partnership with various federal agencies and local organizations, PEPFAR is the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease in history and has been credited with saving 26 million lives.
In late August, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration planned to withhold over half of the $6 billion Congress had already allocated for the program. In fact, the entire program appears to be slated for the chopping block.