Listen to your doctor, not anybody else

In the months that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been threatening America’s health with his pseudo-science nonsense, the nation could at least hope that he was freelancing. President Donald Trump, after all, has been focused lately on priorities such as militarizing America’s streets and policing late-night talk show monologues. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn RFK Jr., with his multi-pronged assault on mainstream medical science, was just being allowed to go off down his own rabbit hole while the boss was busy pursuing autocracy.

Alas, Trump himself demolished that hope on Monday in a joint news conference with Kennedy that medical professionals across the country are describing as an especially dangerous moment in this dangerous era of politicized science. Trump fully endorsed Kennedy’s unsupported dogma linking acetaminophen to autism and described Kennedy as “the man who brought this issue to the forefront of American politics,” according to the Tribune News Service.

On that, if nothing else regarding this topic, Trump is right — though it’s not the compliment he intended. What Kennedy is doing in giving the federal government’s imprimatur to this unproven link, altering official guidelines to physicians, is, indeed, a victory of fringe politics over solid science. And that’s happening, it is now clear, with Trump’s four-square support.

That makes it more important than ever for people to talk to, and trust, their own doctors and not this medically clueless president and his determined zealot of a health czar.

“In some respects this was the most unhinged discussion of autism that I have ever listened to,” Dr. Helen Tager-Flusberg, founder of the Coalition of Autism Scientists, said in a New York Times discussion with experts on the topic that encompasses much of what mainstream medicine is saying about it.

“It was clear that none of the presenters knew much about autism ... and nothing about the existing science,” Dr. Tager-Flusberg added. “This may be the most difficult day in my career.”

It was Trump himself who brought the most unhinged moments to the White House event. With apparent pride and zero self-awareness, he boasted how he and Kennedy together have substituted their non-medical judgment for that of the experts.

“It’s turning out that we understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it,” Trump declared. Then, because he can seldom resist boiling complex issues down to silly baseless theories, Trump questioned whether those experts “were really letting the public know what they knew.”

It’s important to stress here that practically none of what Trump and Kennedy spouted on Monday was rooted in medical science.

The alleged link between autism in infants and pregnant women’s use of acetaminophen (Trump, untrained layman that he is, repeatedly referred to it by its brand-name, Tylenol) isn’t supported by major studies. Trump’s advice to women that they “tough it out” instead of taking the drug ignores the real dangers of allowing fever during pregnancy to go untreated.

Their assertion that autism is an “epidemic,” with skyrocketing numbers of cases in recent years, ignores the view of many experts that those added diagnoses have more to do with better understanding of autism and better diagnostic processes than in the past.

In addition to announcing that the federal government will now offer to physicians scientifically invalid guidelines regarding acetaminophen and autism, Trump raised the specter that promoting a supposed link between vaccines and autism — which has been thoroughly debunked outside the anti-vax fever swamps — will be the next on Kennedy’s official agenda.

Monday’s event was “the most dangerously irresponsible press conference in the realm of public health in American history,” Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia vaccine researcher, told The Washington Post.