Obama Rebukes Trump’s Tylenol-Autism Link as ‘Violence Against the Truth’

Former President Barack Obama accused President Donald Trump of “violence against the truth” for pushing “broad claims” that using Tylenol when pregnant could increase risk of autism in newborns.

Trump made the announcement on Monday after tasking Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. with uncovering the cause of autism and advised women to “talk to their doctors about limiting the use of this medication while pregnant.”

“Taking Tylenol is not good,” he said.

Speaking at London’s O2 Arena in conversation with British historian and filmmaker David Olusoga on Wednesday, Obama told the UK audience that Trump’s remarks about acetaminophen endangered women.

So we have the spectacle of my successor in the Oval Office making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproved. And the degree to which that undermines public health, the degree to which that can do harm to women who are pregnant, the degree of which that creates anxiety for parents who do have children who are autistic, which, by the way, itself is subject to a spectrum and a lot of what is being trumpeted as these massive increases actually have to do with a broadening of the criteria across that spectrum so that people can actually get services and help.

All of that is violence against the truth.

Obama, who avoided using Trump’s name, cast the remarks as part of a larger ideological battle in the U.S.

He went on to warn of a “tug of war” between the progressives and populists, who he said were seeking to return to a “very particular way of thinking about America, where ‘we, the people’, is just some people, not all people.”

The former president, who is on a European speaking tour, will appear in Dublin later this week to be awarded with the Freedom of the City honor.

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