“Are you making good health decisions?” reads one Robert F. Kennedy Jr. meme on social media, a slogan printed against an image of a smiling US health secretary. Such social media posts invariably invite lively comments beneath them, but the situation is deadly serious.
On 22 September, Donald Trump and RFK Jr. publicly proposed a link between paracetamol – commonly referred to in the US by the brand name Tylenol – and autism. The paracetamol link has also been shown, through rigorous research, to be false.
It’s far from the first falsehood about science to be presented at the highest levels of the US government. While RFK Jr. denies being anti-vaccination, he has repeatedly stated debunked claims about supposed vaccine harm.
