The Social World

Tag: RFK Jr.

  • By order of the non-doctor

    By order of the non-doctor

    Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not say, in yesterday’s cabinet meeting, that circumcision causes autism. But the fact that we’d even consider that a real statement shows just how far down the rabbit hole into the MAHA Wonderland of his mind RFK has dragged us. In fact, RFK said that after doctors circumcise boys, they give them too much Tylenol, and that causes autism. President “Don’t Take Tylenol” responded, “there’s a tremendous amount of proof or evidence. I would say as a non-doctor, but I’ve studied this a long time.” 

    A non-doctor is right, and I say this as someone who’s not a fan of male circumcision, a practice based on dated religious superstition. If we abhor female circumcision as a barbaric practice (and we should), then why is male circumcision any different? This is a personal issue for me. My wife didn’t want to circumcise our son more than 20 years ago, but my Jewish parents, now deceased, threatened to disown him, and me, if we didn’t do it. There was no bris. We didn’t enjoy wine and bagels afterwards. A urologist strapped our baby to a board and caused him untold pain, for no reason. I’ll never be able to unhear those screams.  

    Thank you for allowing me to process that trauma. But the point here is that the doctor probably gave our son Tylenol, and our son doesn’t have autism. I’m also circumcised, as are most men I know, or at least I assume they are. We don’t talk about such things. No one ever interviewed me for the studies that RFK cited at the cabinet meeting. “Circumcision leads to autism” is just embarrassing crankery that plays on people’s emotions.  

    Then, on the same day we saw “RFK claims circumcision causes autism” headlines, the Wall Street Journal decided to run a light feature story on RFK’s strange habit of working out wearing jeans. They show photos of him bench-pressing in denim and climbing Phoenix’s Camelback Mountain in denim. I grew up in Phoenix and did that Camelback hike many times. It’s no fun in workout shorts; hiking in jeans is suicide.  

    We live in interesting health times, where the Health Secretary issues a joint “fitness challenge” with the Secretary of War, does a gym circuit wearing Levis, and claims that vaccines and Tylenol cause autism. At least there’s no more Red Dye #12 in our beef tallow Steak and Shake fries. And I have to wonder if this is actually making us healthier, or if we’re just fetishizing the lifestyle eccentricities of a wealthy bulked-up falconer from America’s most famous political family.  

    This movement is starting to feel like a mirror image of the “more doctors smoke Camels” ads that the tobacco industry used to produce. In 1930, Lucky Strike said that “20,679 Physicians say ‘LUCKIES are less irritating” because of a “toasting” process. Millions of people died because of those campaigns. 

    It’s a long way down the path from that to MAHA claiming that sugar is poison (true) and that brief morning exposure to sunlight helps regulate our circadian rhythms (also true). So let’s bring it all together and list my true prescription for a healthy life: eat moderately, exercise often but not excessively, don’t smoke, don’t get circumcised, DON’T TAKE TYLENOL, and, for god’s sake, don’t climb a mountain in jeans.  

  • Is Trump right to link autism with Tylenol?

    Is Trump right to link autism with Tylenol?

    Donald Trump’s apparent suggestion that people could protect themselves against Covid by injecting themselves with bleach marked a low point in his first administration. It provided his critics with evidence that he was an erratic president trying to ride roughshod over scientific evidence as well as common sense. It is easy, therefore, to dismiss the American president’s announcement that government health warnings will henceforth be printed on packets of Tylenol – the brand name for acetaminophen – telling pregnant women to avoid the painkiller for fear it will cause autism in their unborn children as yet another anti-scientific diatribe.

    The involvement of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – a long-term vaccine skeptic – adds to the impression that the association between autism and acetaminophen might be a little cooked-up. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists lost no time in branding the presidential announcement as “irresponsible.”

    But is there any genuine link between autism and the consumption of Tylenol? There is quite a lot of evidence on this and interestingly, it doesn’t entirely dismiss a link, although if there is one, it does not appear to be very strong.

    A review of the evidence was published in the journal Environmental Health in August – carried out by a team of scientists from several universities, including Harvard and the University of California. It looked at 46 studies, 27 of which found a link between acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders in children (not just autism but also attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, ADHD). Of the others, nine found a null link and four found a negative association – i.e., suggesting that acetaminophen could actually lower the risk of neurodevelopment disorders. It didn’t classify the remainder of the studies into either of those groups. Pointedly, however, the review suggested that the higher-quality studies were more likely to show a positive association between acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders.

    But how big is the link? One of the most comprehensive studies on this subject uses data on 2.5 million Swedish children born between 1995 and 2019. It found that 1.42 percent of children whose mothers had taken acetaminophen during pregnancy went on to develop autism, compared with 1.33 percent of children whose mothers didn’t take the painkiller. There are other things to consider behind this rather weak association – mothers who took acetaminophen were quite likely to have been in worse general health than those who did not, so their acetaminophen use is surely not the only thing going on here.    

    Yesterday’s announcement is not purely some off-the-cuff move by Trump – it is backed by Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the National Institutes of Health (whose background is nevertheless in economics rather than medicine). He was one of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which called for young people less at risk of Covid to be allowed to get on with their lives during the pandemic.

    While evidence for any link between Tylenol and autism is certainly not strong, it is not unreasonable to ask whether pregnant women – and many other people, for that matter – should try to avoid taking Tylenol if they can. Taking medical drugs is often a trade-off between risk and reward, and while the risks in this case might not be great, nor, in many cases, will be the rewards.

    A lot of people are taking painkillers far too routinely without considering that pain is there for a reason: it is telling you not to put too much weight on that injured ankle or warning you that there might be some serious problem in your stomach. Kill the pain and you kill the warning with it.       

    The presentation of the Trump administration’s policy, however, is dreadful. Trump’s assertion that the Amish community don’t have autism because they don’t take painkillers does seem a little dubious, as does RFK Jr.’s claim that there aren’t many 70-year-olds with full-blown autism. The diagnosis of autism has certainly increased dramatically in recent decades but it seems to me to be strongly related to it being a fashionable diagnosis. There are plenty of 70-year-olds living in institutions who were never diagnosed with autism when they were young but who would be now.    

  • The Feds move in on Bolton

    The Feds move in on Bolton

    “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission,” FBI director Kash Patel posted on X at 7 a.m. ET. He provided a solution to that cryptogram soon after, as agents raided the Bethesda home of permanently grouchy former Trump national security advisor John Bolton. Over his pre-raid morning coffee, Bolton was criticizing Trump’s Russia-Ukraine negotiations, calling them basically useless: “Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, but I don’t see these talks making any progress,” he wrote. Soon after, the cars pulled up. Whoops!

    A source told Daily Caller editor Vince Coglianese, “This is related to a national security investigation of Mr. Bolton that was shut down by the Biden administration for political reasons. It involves stealing classified documents and weaponizing them for political purposes. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino have reopened the investigation. Hence this morning’s raid.”

    John Bolton has the right to either remain silent or tweet whatever he wants, but though he remains a free man, charges may loom. Cockburn is no fan of the Walrus’s war machinations, and is interested to see how this particular saga unfolds. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino tweeted this morning, “Public corruption will not be tolerated.”

    Meanwhile Roger Stone, no stranger to house raids, said on X: “Good morning. John Bolton. How does it feel to have your home raided at 6 o’clock in the morning?”

    Visiting the People’s House gift shop this morning while wearing a red MAGA cap emblazoned with the slogan “Trump was right about everything,” President Trump had this to say about the Bolton warrant: “Don’t know about it. Saw it on television this morning. Not a fan, he’s sort of a lowlife. He’s a very quiet person, except on television if he can say something bad about Trump. Not a smart guy, could be a very unpatriotic guy. We’re going to find out.”

    Cockburn hears there are a few beds open at Alligator Alcatraz.

    On our radar

    HAVING A BALL The President took reporters – including The Spectator’s Matt McDonald – to look at architectural improvement being made by the administration. They have stopped at the People’s House, which has a new gift shop, and are outside the Kennedy Center, where the 2026 FIFA World Cup draw will be held.

    CAPITAL CRACKDOWN Seventy-six arrests were made last night as part of the White House’s temporary federalization of DC law enforcement. That brings the total to 719 made since Trump activated the emergency clause of the 1973 Home Rule Act. Of the 719, 36 were illegal aliens.

    PAT ON THE BACK Representative Riley Moore has urged President Trump to confer the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, onto Pat Buchanan. The journalist, Nixon aide and three-time populist candidate for the White House is widely seen as something of a John the Baptist for MAGA, emphasizing the same core agenda of immigration controls and a rebalancing of the terms of trade. Such a gong for Buchanan would formalize the inheritance.

    Counterrevolution in Minnesota?

    Is the Democratic establishment – whose obituary has been read many times over the past decade – now twitching back to life? Possibly – in Minnesota at least. The Democratic Farmer Labour party (the Democrats’ local chapter) has taken the remarkable step of revoking its earlier endorsement of Omar Fateh, the Zohran Mamdani-like candidate for mayor of Minneapolis.

    Their reason? The Minneapolis DFL’s Convention last month, where Mr. Fateh received his endorsement, was widely seen as a fiasco with numerous allegations of rule-breaking and irregularity. The DFL received no less than 98 formal challenges to the result from participants. According to delegate Will Stancil, there were a number of dubious last-minute rule changes that favored Fateh, a malfunctioning electronic voting system, and general procedural skulduggery. Stancil made no less than four attempts to vote before his choice was recorded. As a result, the DFL’s endorsement has now been “vacated” – throwing an unexpected lifeline to the incumbent Jacob Frey, the more centrist candidate, though someone who presided over some of the worst rioting of summer 2020.

    The forward march of the Democratic far-left seems to have been checked in Minnesota. Cockburn, for his part, welcomes this sudden and by no means cynical conversion to the cause of election integrity.

    RFK Jr.’s good jeans

    It’s the viral fitness challenge that’s taking the MAGAsphere by storm: cabinet secretaries Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are laying down the gauntlet of the “Pete & Bobby Challenge” to their peers. The ask: 100 push-ups, 50 pull-ups, 10 minutes – ostensibly as part of an effort to Make America Healthy Again. In the snazzy viral video promoting the effort, shot at the Pentagon Gym with hyper-fit members of the military, the septuagenarian Secretary Kennedy busts out the challenge in close to five minutes, sporting a pair of blue jeans.

    RFK Jr.’s commitment to denim knows no limits. An athletic-minded tipster was sweltering away in the Georgetown Gold’s Gym on Wednesday morning, as the air conditioning was broken. Sat opposite him, without a bead of sweat on him: RFK Jr. In jeans.