SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This week, President Trump and other administration officials suggested that taking acetaminophen during pregnancy is linked to autism in children. Doctors disagree and say there's no strong evidence for that. But it could still be a big headache for Kenvue, the company that makes Tylenol, a popular brand of acetaminophen. NPR's pharmaceuticals correspondent, Sydney Lupkin, joins us. Sydney, thanks so much for being with us.
SYDNEY LUPKIN, BYLINE: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: Help us understand all of this. Tylenol, of course, is hardly new. What did the Trump administration say exactly?
LUPKIN: Yeah. So the president said Tylenol, quote, "can be associated with a very increased risk of autism," and he told pregnant women not to take it. Officials who were with him, like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said they would be taking steps to update Tylenol's label. That said, the Food and Drug Administration was a little more measured in its press release about this. It said although some studies found an association between the painkiller and autism, they had not established whether the painkiller, in fact, caused autism. The agency also said that acetaminophen is the only safe over-the-counter pain medication for pregnant women to take for things like fever, which can be harmful for a developing fetus.
SIMON: What could this potentially mean for lawsuits against Tylenol's maker?
LUPKIN: I spoke to one lawyer representing plaintiffs in an ongoing case alleging the painkiller caused autism and ADHD in children whose mothers took it during pregnancy. And that lawyer says his office has received more than a thousand calls this week. The attorney's name is Ashley Keller.
ASHLEY KELLER: A lot of inbound calls have come in, as you would expect, now that a very bright spotlight has been put on this issue. And we are investigating people's cases, and we do plan to accept more clients if they have worthy cases.
LUPKIN: That lawsuit hit a roadblock in late 2023. A judge ruled to exclude testimony from the experts Keller and his colleagues had gathered. She wrote that those experts cherry-picked and misinterpreted the data they were relying on. So Keller and his team were appealing and actually have a court date in early October.
SIMON: Could President Trump's announcement change anything for that?
LUPKIN: Well, Keller thinks maybe. His team is filing a letter with the court. That's because one of the experts the judge excluded was mentioned during the Trump administration's press conference on Monday. Keller and his team were thinking, you know, well, if this expert and his study are good enough for the federal government, why not the court? But I spoke to a few legal experts about it, including Sonia Suter, a law professor at George Washington University.
SONIA SUTER: So nothing's changed. There's not new data. There's just a particular reliance on this data by this administration.
LUPKIN: She says product liability cases like this are tough to win. Ultimately, lawyers will have to prove causation, and that just hasn't yet been established. In fact, a big study published in 2024 in the medical journal JAMA looked at 2.5 million kids born over 25 years. And researchers concluded Tylenol wasn't even associated with an increased risk of autism or ADHD or intellectual disability.
SIMON: Yet I gather this could still be a problem for Tylenol's manufacturer. I wonder what they say about all this.
LUPKIN: Yeah. Kenvue says it disagrees with any suggestion that taking acetaminophen causes autism because decades of scientific research show that it is safe. The company also noted that high fevers and pain are widely recognized as potential risks to a pregnancy if left untreated.
SIMON: NPR's pharmaceuticals correspondent, Sydney Lupkin. Thanks so much.
LUPKIN: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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