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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.
Why is the American right so obsessed with autism and discovering some unknown or suppressed cause for it?
Politicising medicine in general is baffling to me, like how Ivermectin is right-wing while vaccines are left-wing (and I remember 20 years ago most antivax people were leftwing). At some point it feels like American politics is about picking any conceivable topic and flipping a coin to declare one side Republican and the other Democrat.
Conservatives are the ones having kids and so are the more concerned now about what they're putting into their kids bodies.
They are also more aware of the breakdown in classroom behavior, increase of violent outbreaks, and having a medical reason to pin it on is useful.
I could just as well turn this around. "If conservative women have three kids, that is is enough redundancy that they do not need to bother with measles vaccines."
In the real world, almost all parents want what is best for their kids, they just disagree about the facts.
Is this actually a thing or is it yet another moral panic, like the superpredator scare, the D&D satanism scare, the rock music scare, the violent video game scare and so on?
Sure, but why not go for some timeless classic like "autism is caused by demonic possession", instead of badmouthing paracetamol?
Difficult to get data on afaict. Short version you've probably heard before is admin doesn't want too many suspensions (disparate impact; doesn't matter that the school is 90% black either), teachers eventually stop reporting unless the behavior is a severe threat, so maybe you can muddle it out from surveys of teacher unhappiness/early retirements, but I wouldn't be confident at all if someone said "suspensions are down so behavior can't be that bad."
From local teacher anecdotes, yes, it's a thing, but I don't know for sure how widespread.
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