Fact-checking claims Trump made about autism
US President Donald Trump has attracted condemnation from health experts, after he sought to claim that there was a link between the widely used painkiller Tylenol and autism.
Accompanied by his Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump said that doctors would soon be advised not to recommend the drug – called paracetamol in some other countries, including the UK – to pregnant women.
The claims have been attacked by medical experts. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said the announcement was “unsettling” and not based on “reliable data”, while the UK’s National Autism Society called Trump’s statement “dangerous, it’s anti-science and it’s irresponsible”.
BBC Verify has looked at some of the allegations Trump and Kennedy made during their news conference at the White House.
Is Trump correct that US autism diagnoses are rising?
During the event, Trump listed a number of statistics which he said showed that autism diagnoses in the US have risen rapidly over the past two decades.
Firstly, the US president claimed that incidence has increased from around “one in 10,000…probably 18 years ago” to “one in 31” by 2025.
The final statistic quoted by Trump – that autism rates have risen to one in 31 – is correct. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2022 found that level of diagnoses among eight year olds across 16 US states.
While that rate has grown from 18 years ago, it did not grow by anything like the figure cited by Trump. While there was no figure for 2007 – the year cited by Trump – in 2006 the CDC estimated the rate of autism in the US population to be 1 in 110. In 2008 it was 1 in 88.
Most experts say rising rates of autism can primarily be attributed to changes in how the condition is diagnosed, as well as greater recognition of the condition and more people being tested.
Trump also claimed on Sunday that California has a “more severe problem” with autism than other states surveyed by the CDC.
The CDC estimated that in 2022, about 1 in 12 eight-year old boys in California had autism – the highest rate for boys in the study across 16 US states.
But the agency noted that the state has funded a local initiative training hundreds of local paediatricians “to screen and refer children for assessment as early as possible, which could result in higher identification” of autism.
What has Trump said about autism previously?
Trump has intermittently expressed concern over rising rates of autism in US children for almost 20 years. In 2007 he first publicly suggested that he believed that there was a link between vaccines and the increasing prevalence.
The president has expressed interest in Kennedy’s work since at least 2017, when Kennedy said that Trump had asked him to lead a vaccine safety taskforce. Seven years later, Kennedy – who was then polling at around 5% – dropped his bid for the presidency and endorsed Trump.
In a leaked call with Kennedy during the election campaign and in which the Republican tried to coax the independent to support him – Trump was heard discussing discredited claims about the health risks of childhood vaccines. After the election Trump announced him as his choice to lead the department of health and human services, with a mandate to “make America healthy again”.
However, during his first term Trump did support some vaccine campaigns. During a 2019 measles outbreak in the US he said that people “have to get the shots. Vaccinations are so important”, and it was his administration that oversaw the rapid development and early roll-out of Covid-19 vaccinations.
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