This week, President Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his secretary of health and human services, suggested a link between Tylenol use during pregnancy and autism. The claim, which has been widely debunked by experts and is not backed by medical science, became instant social media fodder.
Trump and Kennedy’s announcement included a graphic featuring the words “Autism Announcement,” splashed across a blue background. It quickly became repurposed as a meme by many in the Autism community.
“How it feels telling the group chat I don’t want to eat at the restaurant they planned because I don’t like the texture of the food they serve,” one X user posted. “When I’m on a date and they ask me about my hobbies,” another wrote. Summing up the week’s online discourse, one put: “The Tylenol memes have been incredible. What a gift Trump gave us.”
In his address, Trump suggested that pregnant people in America should instead “tough it out” rather than resort to taking the common pain reliever. Unsurprisingly, many pregnant people did not welcome his unsolicited advice and instead responded to his comments by filming themselves popping pills in defiance.
“I have a list of things I would be worried about if I were pregnant now in the US but taking Tylenol for my fever wouldn’t be one of them,” reads the caption to one video. “Dear RFK…. kindly go away. Sincerely, a 36-week pregnant person with terrible hip pain,” reads another.
To avoid stoking the moral panic that’s since circulated online, it’s worth mentioning many of the videos don’t even show pregnant women taking the drug; if they do, they are taking the recommended dosage. Most have since been taken down, likely due to backlash.
Many conservatives failed to see the funny side.
“Democrats are now chugging bottles of Tylenol on TikTok,” Calley Means, Kennedy’s health adviser and a key figure in the MAHA movement, claimed in an X post viewed over five million times. “If Trump said that oxygen was good, I am convinced there are people out there who would suffocate themselves,” Riley Gaines, the conservative activist known for campaigning against trans women in college sports, said in a video.
While the reactions and memes are fun, the problem of health misinformation being peddled across social media is a growing problem.
As Forbes reported this week, citing data from the platform analytics company Zelf, TikTok videos about acetaminophen, vaccines, and autism received more than 100 million views in the 48 hours following Trump’s announcement. The four most popular of those videos picked up more than 33 million cumulative views. None of the videos included the crucial context that medical science does not support Trump’s allegations.
As one X user joked, “I’d like to congratulate Tylenol on their upcoming multimillion-dollar lawsuit settlement.”
