Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: A senile reality TV star and a publicity-seeking nepo baby walk into a press conference and announce that a widely used pain reliever may cause autism …

Punch line? No punch line. It really happened, though few would have noticed if the senile reality TV star (Donald Trump) wasn’t the president of the United States and the publicity-seeking nepo baby (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) wasn’t a member of that president’s cabinet.

Because of their identities, I guess we need to talk about whether what they’re saying is true, and about why they’re saying it now.

Guess what? What they’re saying MAY be true.

At least some studies have indeed found at least some correlation between acetaminophen use by pregnant women and subsequent diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorder and/or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in their children.

Correlation is not the same thing as causation, and studies have yet to establish the latter at any significant level of confidence. It might well turn out that the underlying causes of the pain, rather than effects of the drug used to alleviate the pain, are responsible. Or the correlation could just be random statistical noise.

But it does seem like an investigation that’s worth pursuing.

And it does seem like a legitimate reason for pregnant women to consider solutions other than acetaminophen for their pain relief needs.

In fact, it’s just one more in a long line of reasons for everyone to avoid acetaminophen. The drug has been CONVINCINGLY linked to liver damage (especially among drinkers) and kidney damage (among long-term users).

Maybe there’s really no  causal link to autism/ADHD; maybe there is. But with any number of pain relief options out there, does it really make sense to continue using a drug we already knew was bad for us?

While a senile reality TV star and publicity-seeking nepo baby might not be the best spokesmen for an anti-acetaminophen advocacy campaign, those of us who care about our own health and the health of our loved ones should probably just take the “I learned something today” win here.

As to reasons for the sudden, and obviously fast-tracked, rollout of the Trump/RFK campaign, we can plausibly infer that it’s of a piece with other recent publicity plays, from Trump’s murder campaign in the Caribbean, to the making of a podcaster into a partisan martyr, to the “cancellation” campaigns against anti-Trump media.

What ties all those things together? Donald Trump’s quest for distractions from the matter of his close personal relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein.

He’s “flooding the zone with sh*t,” as Steve Bannon put it, in hope of making that controversy go away.

Release the Epstein files.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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