GENEVA: Neither the painkiller Tylenol nor vaccines have been shown to cause autism, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday (Sep 23), following comments from the US president and his administration to the contrary.
President Donald Trump insisted on Monday that pregnant women should “tough it out” and avoid Tylenol due to an unproven link to autism and also urged major changes to the standard vaccines administered to babies.
Medical groups have long cited acetaminophen, or paracetamol – the primary ingredient in Tylenol – as among the safest painkillers to take during pregnancy.
WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic acknowledged that there had been some “observational studies that have suggested a possible association between prenatal exposure to acetaminophen or paracetamol and autism”.
But, he told reporters in Geneva, “the evidence remains inconsistent”.
He pointed out that a number of studies conducted since the observational studies had “found no such relationship”.
“If the link between acetaminophen and autism were strong, it would likely have been consistently observed across multiple studies,” he said, warning against “drawing casual conclusions about the role of acetaminophen in autism”.
Vaccines were also on the rambling agenda of Trump’s press conference on Monday, when he repeated anti-vax movement talking points.
He sowed doubt over standard vaccines including the MMR shot – which covers measles, mumps and rubella – and implied he would end the common use of aluminium in vaccines, the safety of which has been widely studied.
