Free Press readers will be familiar with the name Dr. Marty Makary. Now the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Makary was an early Free Press contributor, publishing important pieces at the height of the Covid pandemic questioning school lockdowns, exposing doctrinaire thinking in our public health establishment, and confronting cant with facts.
Which is why I called the former Johns Hopkins professor to discuss the Trump administration’s bombshell announcement this week that autism is tied to Tylenol use during pregnancy.
Below is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Bari Weiss: On Monday at a White House press conference, President Trump, standing alongside you and other members of his administration, declared that autism is linked to Tylenol use during pregnancy. He said that there is “a very increased” risk of autism when pregnant women take Tylenol. Is that true?
Marty Makary: There are a number of pathways involved in autism, each of which may be a cause. As we unlock the science behind these different pathways, we arrive at a point in our investigation where there is enough information that should be made available to the public in real time.
One finding that we believed rose to that level was the association between prenatal acetaminophen and autism—an association that was affirmed in a Harvard review published four weeks ago. One of the co-authors of the study, the dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that there is a causal association between prenatal acetaminophen and the neurodevelopmental disorders of ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. When the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health is waving a flag in the air about an expanding epidemic that barely existed a generation ago, an epidemic that affects over two million kids in a way that makes their lives brutal, and we know that most acetaminophen prescribed is unnecessary, do you have a moral obligation to let the public know about this body of research?
