Doctor warns paracetamol causes Trump Derangement Syndrome

The day before yesterday, President Trump introduced a 1½ hour briefing by the heads of all his health agencies, in which they summarised their efforts to get to the bottom of the appalling increase in autism across America (and indeed the West), from a one-time incidence of 1:200,000 to around 1:50. According to Trump, in California that rises to 1:12 male children. It can no longer be explained by increased detection or overdiagnosis.

The various medical directors, including epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya of Great Barrington Declaration fame, explained the shortcomings of past research in searching for environmental causes for autism, which they expect to be multifactorial, and discussed new grants for research on these, including research on the role of vaccines.

But as Andrea Baccarelli, M.D., Ph.D., Dean of the Faculty, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, explained of this particular briefing:

“Colleagues and I recently conducted a rigorous review, funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), of the potential risks of acetaminophen use during pregnancy… We found evidence of an association between exposure to acetaminophen [called paracetamol in the UK] during pregnancy and increased incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders in children.”

Multiple papers were cited supporting this association, whilst she also acknowledged that a minority of papers found no such link. But as a result, on the precautionary principle properly applied, pending further work the agencies have decided to modify the indications on the data sheet of the drug, advising against its use in pregnancy wherever possible, and also in infancy, except when advised by a physician. This change is in fact very belated, given that:

In 2021, an international consensus statement highlighted “a call for precautionary action,” recommending that pregnant women “minimize exposure” to acetaminophen “by using the lowest effective dose for the shortest possible time.”

The President topped and tailed the discussion, and as a politician knowing that many in his general audience (and as we will see, the press and politicians) were likely to feel confused by the “scienciness” of the presentation, simplified the message to “Avoid Tylenol in pregnancy if you can’t tough it out, unless your doctor advises otherwise.”

It was all very reasonable, and similar to the precautionary advice given many years ago to avoid junior aspirin for childhood fevers because of an association with the very rare, and usually fully treatable, Reye’s Syndrome. That warning is the very reason that paracetamol is used for childhood fever now, though as one of the physicians at the presentation pointed out, medicating fever in children is usually undesirable, as research shows viral illnesses are actually prolonged by the practice. Unlike Reye’s Syndrome, though, autism is incurable and lifelong (though the briefing also announced a new initiative on trials of potential treatments).

The point on medicating fever is one I made throughout my medical career, especially when young hospital doctors began routinely telling parents to combine paracetamol and ibuprofen to “bring the fever down,” as if pyrexia is a disease rather than a physiological defence. The only legitimate reason was to prevent uncommon febrile convulsions, which in my experience can be pretty reliably avoided by tepid sponging.

So much for the facts. But yesterday the BBC, the Telegraph and the Mail, together no doubt with the entire MSM, published the story as being about medically unqualified Trump randomly slagging off Safeandeffective paracetamol, as he had once advised injecting disinfectant for COVID (he didn’t do that either). There was no mention of the long presentation dominated by medical experts who had spent several months reviewing the current evidence, and there was certainly no mention whatsoever of the actual evidence.

Yet tame doctors were trotted out overnight to say that Trump was talking nonsense and that paracetamol is entirely Safeandeffective in pregnancy. No doubt, they had all been beavering away in the small hours working their way through the entire literature. Or more likely, being the same kind of “professionals” who told us to mask up to stop the spread of an airborne virus and to give our babies an untested genetic therapy to prevent a disease that was known not to harm them, they just said whatever the news editors wanted them to say, after a free breakfast. The Telegraph even cited the FDA in its reassurances, apparently ignorant of the fact that the head of the FDA was part of the team making the announcement in Washington.

Our Health Secretary Wes Streeting, whose highest medical qualification is a degree in history, has authoritatively told the British people to ignore the President’s advice (which remember was actually the advice of the combined medical supremos of the US health agencies). Perhaps Streeting received a quick briefing from a government scientist who had not studied the literature overnight. If so, it was a scientist, rather than just a political monkey, who was using the political methodology of “Trump said it, so say the opposite.” A number of doctors have admitted that this was indeed their “scientific method” during COVID, rather than anything more rational.

Sadly, when I made the same kind of points I have made here as a comment under the Daily Mail article (using my own “Dr Jon Garvey” name), downvotes outweighed upvotes. A readership that has learned to reject the Mail’s false reporting on the Unite the Kingdom rally has nevertheless been so successfully indoctrinated to hate Donald Trump since 2016, that it is unable to see when a news report is mere empty propaganda.

And so, even without setting up a task force to study the matter, as President Trump did, I can say with confidence that Calpol has a strong association with incurable Trump Derangement Syndrome, and should therefore be avoided. It’s thoroughly depressing, once again, to be reminded that our government, our press, my own profession, and an apparent majority of the population, have been rendered incapable of critical thinking by ideologues. It’s been so long since the world was sane, hasn’t it?