Trump Admin Briefing Sparks Wave of Tylenol-Autism Posts on Truth Social

TLDR

• The Trump Administration advised pregnant women against taking Tylenol, one of the few pain medications approved for use during pregnancy, citing widely disputed claims that the drug is linked to autism.

• Open Measures identified and analyzed posts that mentioned Tylenol on Truth Social, a micro-blogging platform President Donald Trump owns and uses to communicate with his supporters, to better understand the history of those claims on the platform.

  
  

• Truth Social users shared posts associating Tylenol with autism at a relatively steady pace since the platform debuted in 2022, but their posts rarely drew interest from other platform users. That changed after the Trump Administration endorsed the fringe claims.

• After the Trump Administration warned pregnant women against taking Tylenol, posts on Truth Social associating the drug with autism appeared more often and saw more user engagement. Posts made by accounts belonging to official federal representatives and entities were engaged with the most.

• Researchers found no evidence that Truth Social users were discussing boycotts against Tylenol or debating whether they would continue to use the medication after the Trump Administration cautioned against taking the drug.

Context

At a press conference on Sept. 22, 2025, President Donald Trump and Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warned that taking Tylenol during pregnancy may increase risks of autism and advised that expecting mothers experiencing pain and fevers should try to “tough it out” instead of taking the medication.¹

Decades of scientific and medical research agree that it is safe for pregnant people to take acetaminophen, the generic name of the drug Tylenol contains. The small number of studies suggesting acetaminophen may be linked to prenatal autism are disputed among health professionals; many have also warned that the risks serious fevers pose during pregnancy vastly outweigh any theoretical risks the drug may have.²

Anti-vaccine advocacy organizations like Children’s Health Defense—which Kennedy led for years before he was appointed to Trump’s cabinet—and groups that market alternative health products have promoted claims linking acetaminophen and autism for years.³ Despite this, Trump and Kennedy’s claims about Tylenol ultimately confused and angered many anti-vaccine activists, who are generally more committed to their false belief that vaccines cause autism than their false belief that Tylenol does.⁴

Methodology

Open Measures sought to examine the history of narratives claiming a link between Tylenol and autism on Truth Social, an alternative micro-blogging platform that Trump owns and uses to interact with his online supporters. Using our proprietary toolkit, our researchers identified and analyzed posts about the drug that appeared on the platform since its launch on Feb. 21, 2022.

Researchers first created a search string to capture any posts mentioning Tylenol or any of the generic names of its active ingredient. They used the following search string:

(tylenol OR acetaminophen OR paracetamol)

They expanded the string to identify results that also included terms related to the Trump Administration’s claims about autism and pregnancy as well as potential consumer behaviors. Our researchers also enhanced the string using the “AI Search” feature in Open Measures’ dashboard to include additional suggested terms.

To identify posts associating the drug with pregnancy or autism, our researchers used the following search string:

(tylenol OR acetaminophen OR paracetamol) AND ((autism* OR autistic* OR "ASD" OR asperger* OR "special needs" OR neurodiverg*) OR (pregnan* OR "with child" OR baby OR babies OR infant* OR child* OR kid* OR toddler* OR newborn* OR maternal OR maternity OR prenatal OR postnatal OR trimester*))

To identify posts mentioning the drug alongside terms related to negative consumer behaviors (like boycotts, for example), they used the following search string:

(tylenol OR acetaminophen OR paracetamol) AND (boycott* OR "throw away" OR "throwing away" OR "threw away" OR discard* OR "get rid of" OR dump* OR trash* OR "stop buying" OR "never buy" OR ditch* OR reject* OR refus* OR "switch from" OR "no longer using" OR "done with" OR quit* OR cancel* OR "burn*" OR flush* OR dispose* OR "toss out" OR "throw out" OR "refuse to buy" OR "avoid buying" OR "never buy*")

Analysis

At least 9,400 Truth Social posts mentioned Tylenol or its generic names since the platform launched in 2022. About 40% of those posts associated the drug with pregnancy or autism. 

Truth Social posts linking Tylenol to autism appeared more frequently, and saw higher engagement, following Trump and Kennedy’s news conference advising pregnant women against taking the drug. About 20% of all the posts we identified were shared in the week after the press conference. Further, more than 75% of that week’s posts parrotted the Trump Administration’s claims about Tylenol and autism. 

Mentions of the drug had spiked on Truth Social in the past, though to lesser degrees. Upon closer inspection, our researchers found that most prior spikes followed news developments about lawsuits accusing Tylenol of concealing autism-related risks.⁵ (None of those lawsuits have succeeded.)

Caption: The number of Truth Social posts that mentioned Tylenol or the drug it contains surged after Trump Administration officials claimed the pain medication is linked to autism in a press conference on Sept. 22, 2025.

While about 60% of posts associating the pain medication with autism appeared on the Truth Social before the press conference, only 15 of those were re-shared 100 or more times. Six of those 15 posts were made by extremist media personality Laura Loomer, who began promoting hyperbolic claims about the drug in September 2025. 

The most-shared post among the 15 mentioned above, however, came from the account of Charlie Kirk, a prominent conservative activist who was assassinated on Sept. 10. Made on Sept. 5, Kirk’s post cited a news headline that shares of Kenvue, Tylenol’s parent company, were down amid reports that the Trump Administration was planning to announce that the drug was unsafe for pregnant people.

By comparison, 61 posts made the week after the press conference were re-shared 100 or more times, six of which received more than 500 re-shares. Five of those six posts were made by accounts used by Trump Administration officials; the other was posted by Jacob Creech, a conspiracy theorist who uses the online pseudonym “Clandestine.”⁶

Some posts made before the press conference associated Tylenol with autism and included hyperlinks. Most often, these were links to the website of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine activist group Kennedy once led). Also frequently-linked were the web domains of a legal group that sued Tylenol, various hyperpartisan and tabloid news blogs, and other social platforms (including Rumble, YouTube, and X). 

Caption: Top domains that appeared in Truth Social posts associating Tylenol with autism between Feb. 21, 2022, and Sept. 21, 2025.

In the week after the press conference, most posts associating Tylenol with autism directed to the hyperpartisan conspiracy blog Gateway Pundit. Other domains that were frequently-linked belonged to other social media platforms, partisan news outlets, the National Institutes of Health, and an anti-vaccine activist group. The most-shared URL during this period leads to a Gateway Pundit article amplifying unverified claims about a liberal pregnant woman who overdosed on Tylenol while trying to “prove Trump wrong” about the drug.⁷

Caption: Top domains that appeared in Truth Social posts associating Tylenol with autism between Sept. 22 and 29, 2025.

Our researchers also searched for posts about Tylenol containing terms related to negative consumer behaviors, such as calls to boycott or stop taking the drug. Using the “Discover” function in our dashboard, our researchers found no indicators that Truth Social users were eager to ditch the pain medication.

They also found just one Truth Social post, left on Sept. 25, 2025, that explicitly mentioned boycotting. It read:

Our entire Family is Boycotting Tylenol, Advil is now #1!!!

The post received only one reply.

Conclusion

Open Measures found that Truth Social users had posted claims about an alleged link between Tylenol and autism well before the Trump Administration’s press conference, but they were not broadly popular. After Trump and Kennedy publicly endorsed the fringe concern, Truth Social users began to parrot their claims and engaged with posts that supported them more frequently. However, even as the volume of dubious claims about Tylenol increased on Truth Social, our researchers found no indications that the platform’s users planned to ditch the common pain medication any time soon.