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Trump and RFK blame acetaminophen for childhood autism. I couldn’t find a transcript yet, but the meandering press conference is recorded here. Was this on anyone’s bingo cards?
I’m confused. I vaguely knew that the Trump campaign had decided to fight autism at some point, but I always figured it was appeasement for the antivaxxers. Is there an untapped pool of Tylenol haters out there? Is this a stalking horse for a broader wave of FDA guidelines targeting the usual suspects?
Maybe there’s some sort of political smokescreen going on. We don’t appear to have started any new wars, and domestic hate for Trump looks more or less like it did since last week. If it’s a distraction, it’s not a very efficient one; I had a hard time finding reporting on it, and all the sites that bothered were also eagerly blasting his abuses of the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. That leaves the old-fashioned political motive of throwing meat to the base. Maybe Trump is just checking off campaign promises. But again, it’s so niche.
I suppose there could be some sort of personal beef. If Trump is trying to tank someone’s stock, uh, this is still a pretty weird way to do it.
That’s not even touching the medical case. The administration doesn’t appear to have provided much substance behind their claim. This will dissuade approximately no one. Enjoy your fresh CW battleground.
It means they didn't find shit.
Of course, they can't say that. You saw how the base treated Kash Patel and Pam Bondi when they came up empty-handed after the Epstein investigation. Much easier to put-out some face-saving press release. "Uh, it was the uh, the pills. You know, the red ones. That's where autism comes from. Tylenol. Yeah..." No one ever got fired for telling pregnant women not to take drugs.
Should I wait to see the evidence he used to reach that conclusion, or is that just my insane moon epistemology talking?
I agree that sometimes, scientific findings announced at a press conference can be true. When I watched the announcement of gravity waves being discovered, I did not go into "well, they did not publish in a peer reviewed journal yet, so they are obviously full of shit".
Of course, my priors for LIGO discovering gravity waves were decent, and quite a few respected scientists were staking their reputation on that announcement.
By contrast, my priors for RFK telling his underlings "perhaps look into evil chemicals as a possible cause for autism" and them just finding The Cause (TM) after all these years because previously nobody had thought to look into exposure to drugs as a risk factor seem slim indeed. Nor does he have a scientific reputation to put on stake, I think the median medical scientist is likely of the opinion that he is a quack who has no clue about medicine and it is hard to go further down from there.
I mean, I can obviously not rule out that they found a minor risk factor which explains 5% of the autism cases, after all, the dumbest person in the world saying the sky is blue does not make the sky green, but I am very bearish on the findings living up to their sensationalist claims.
I really hope that there will not be another pandemic while RFK is in office, so that the damage he does is limited to moving NIH funding from projects mentioning trans-isomers in the application to his wild goose chases.
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