If he did not have friends in high places, Doctor Donald John Trump would probably have lost his license to practice medicine a long time ago. Not only has he failed to follow the Hippocratic Oath, but rather than do no harm, he has, in fact, administered great harm.
But, wait, now that I think about it, Doctor Donald John Trump has no medical license. So why, then, is he dispensing ridiculous, even dangerous, medical advice from the White House, or what’s left of the White House?
I am guessing Donald Trump’s colleague Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—like Trump himself, never ever a doctor—put the bug in his ear about the purported link between Tylenol and autism. Kennedy has been in on the manipulative attempt to find a simple solution to the incredibly complicated issue of autism for a while now. Years ago, he went so far as to link the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism, comparing autism rates to the Nazi Holocaust. And he blamed health professionals for urging that parents vaccinate their children against these deadly diseases. So vociferous was the public reaction that he was forced to apologize:
Kennedy’s language was indeed outrageous: “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of 103 [degrees], they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our country.” For Kennedy, doctors were killers not healers, and autistic children had no brains.
But beyond his cruelty, we are living with the consequences of his unrelenting campaign against the very safe vaccines that prevent childhood diseases like measles, mumps, and whooping cough. Childhood vaccination rates have dropped to the point where our communities are vulnerable to diseases we were once so close to controlling, even eradicating:
As the UK Independent notes:
America may be on track to losing its longstanding measles ‘elimination status,’ held by the United States since 2000.
The status indicates that there has not been continuous spread of the infectious disease for more than a year – but vaccine hesitancy and other factors have sent infections rocketing to their highest levels in 25 years. There have been 1,648 cases and three deaths tied to the virus this year so far, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data …
In South Carolina, the outbreak fueled by exposures at Spartanburg County elementary schools has grown to 37 cases, including many unvaccinated students. Utah has seen 64 cases largely around the Southwest, 61 of whom were unvaccinated. Exposure to measles without being vaccinated can prove fatal. Two young children died in the Texas outbreak earlier this year. Measles may also lead to pneumonia, ear infections and brain swelling, as well as fever and a reddish-pink rash.
The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is 97 percent effective against infection … However, child vaccination rates have fallen across the U.S. since before the pandemic, with fewer than 92.5 percent of kindergarteners getting a measles shot for this 2024-2025 school year. Doctors say falling rates are tied to increasing vaccine hesitancy and the spread of misinformation about vaccine safety.
Before his latest foray into blaming Tylenol, Kennedy’s focus was on the purported link between autism and the preservative thimerosal present in the early days of childhood vaccines.
For years, Kennedy relied upon a 1998 British study, authored by Dr. Wakefield and others in The Lancet, for his claims that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine caused autism. But as several researchers point out:
Almost immediately afterward, epidemiological studies were conducted and published, refuting the posited link between MMR vaccination and autism …The logic that the MMR vaccine may trigger autism was also questioned because a temporal link between the two is almost predestined: both events, by design (MMR vaccine) or definition (autism), occur in early childhood.
The next episode in the saga was a short retraction of the interpretation of the original data by 10 of the 12 co-authors of the paper. According to the retraction, ‘no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient’ … This was accompanied by an admission by the Lancet that Wakefield et al. … had failed to disclose financial interests (e.g., Wakefield had been funded by lawyers who had been engaged by parents in lawsuits against vaccine-producing companies). … The Lancet completely retracted the Wakefield et al. … paper in February 2010, admitting that several elements in the paper were incorrect, contrary to the findings of the earlier investigation. … Wakefield et al. … were held guilty of ethical violations (they had conducted invasive investigations on the children without obtaining the necessary ethical clearances) and scientific misrepresentation (they reported that their sampling was consecutive when, in fact, it was selective) … The final episode in the saga is the revelation that Wakefield et al. … were guilty of deliberate fraud (they picked and chose data that suited their case; they falsified facts).
As for Doctor Trump, only MAGA could forget the egregious stupidities of his approach to COVID-19. On April 24, 2020, the BBC reported on two of his strategies:
Claim 1: ‘I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.’ …
Mr. Trump suggested injecting patients with disinfectants might help treat coronavirus …
Not only does consuming or injecting disinfectant risk poisoning and death, it’s not even likely to be effective. Doctors have appealed to people not to ingest or inject disinfectant, as there are concerns people will think this is a good idea and die. ‘Injecting bleach or disinfectant at the dose required to neutralise viruses in the circulating blood would likely result in significant, irreversible harm and probably a very unpleasant death,’ says Rob Chilcott, professor of toxicology at the University of Hertfordshire … Reckitt Benckiser, a leading manufacturer of disinfectant products including Lysol and Dettol, has issued a statement in response to the president’s comments. It said: ‘We must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).’
[Emphasis added.]
Then there was his plan to somehow move lights through the skin into the body to fight the virus:
So, having learned nothing from COVID, Donald Trump decided to appoint vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, promising Kennedy would make America Great and Healthy Again:
Doctor Trump revealed once again that he still knows nothing about disease and has no idea how to make America healthy. Meanwhile, both of them, often with vehemence, even venom, continue to attack those medical professionals like Anthony Fauci who really do know something about disease and crafting public health policy. Those medical professionals have actually treated patients, spent decades developing and testing vaccines, and have had to watch all too many people, both here in America and abroad, needlessly suffer and die because they chose to do without those life-saving vaccinations. And now with power, Kennedy and Trump, having mocked those professionals for years, have stupidly chosen to fire them.
So just how sensible and reliable has Robert F. Kennedy’s medical advice been in the past? The Washington Post collected a bunch of his misleading statements.
The Post wrote:
Kennedy falsely called the coronavirus vaccine the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made’
At a 2021 state House hearing on a Louisiana Department of Health proposal to require schoolchildren to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, Kennedy proclaimed the vaccine to be the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made.’ …
At the time, Louisiana State Health Officer Joseph Kanter condemned Kennedy’s remarks as ‘the intentional spread of health disinformation.’ …
Asked by The Post last year about his previous comments, Kennedy’s spokeswoman stood by his remarks in an email that repeated misleading statements about childhood vaccines …
Kennedy has falsely touted ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as effective covid treatments
Kennedy falsely claimed in a July interview last year with Fox News that fewer people would have died of covid-19 if the United States had deployed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Multiple studies have concluded that the antiparasitic and antimalarial drugs are ineffective against covid-19, despite the promotion of the drug by right-wing media … The FDA has approved ivermectin for treating some parasitic infections, head lice and skin conditions such as rosacea — but not for the coronavirus. In spring 2020, the FDA authorized the emergency use of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, to treat the coronavirus. But less than three months later, the agency withdrew the drug’s authorization because the medications ‘were unlikely to be effective.’
Not only was Kennedy urging the use of the ineffective ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, but his Children’s Health Defense (CHD) legal team was actively intervening against the remedy that was, in fact, completely effective: the COVID vaccine. In the words of CHD, “taking legal action to stop children from receiving illegal, unethical and dangerous vaccines that lack adequate long-term safety and efficacy testing.”
So contorted was his paranoia and penchant for conspiracies that having convinced himself that the vaccine was a weapon, he imagined the COVID-19 virus was a weapon as well. The Post continues:
Kennedy argued that covid-19 was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. ‘Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,’ Kennedy said in a video recorded by the New York Post last July. ‘Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.’ There is no scientific basis to these claims. Scientists and politicians have widely decried Kennedy’s remarks as racist and antisemitic.
The frightening reality is that far too many people suffered and needlessly died because both Donald John Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continued to lie about COVID-19. Unfortunately, whether we understand it or not, the stakes for all of us have been—and are still—so very high. Many of us have successfully put thoughts of COVID-19 behind us, and sadly, completely reliable statistics of the toll COVID has taken are still lacking. I doubt we will ever have an accurate picture of how many were stricken, how many still suffer from long COVID, and how many died. But here are the latest statistics for deaths in Massachusetts for 2022. For us in Massachusetts, COVID-19 was the fourth highest cause of death:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could not have been more wrong or thoroughly irresponsible when it came to the COVID-19 vaccine. A recent study in the Journal of American Medicine makes clear how wrong he was:
Ioannidis and colleagues use publicly accessible databases to estimate both lives and life-years saved worldwide among individuals who were vaccinated from December 2020 until October 2024. Moreover, the authors estimated the number of deaths that might have occurred without vaccination and reductions of mortality from vaccines, stratified by age and time period (which was important given that different SARS-CoV-2 variants were emerging over time). For instance, the Omicron variant (which was identified in November 2021) was so highly transmissible that an estimated 89.4% of US residents had nucleocapsid antibodies (indicating natural infection) by November 2022. Their modeling found that COVID-19 vaccinations averted 2.5 million deaths from 2020-2024 … Moreover, the estimated benefits had a steep age gradient. Most life-years saved (76%) from the vaccines were in people older than 60 years, with vaccination of children and even young adults contributing little to the overall benefit.
Why are these modeling data so important? … Vaccines save lives and the only way to get through this pandemic was always immunity; it is much safer to provide immunity to an older person through a vaccine than through natural infection. For instance, a large analysis performed late 2021 across most European countries, the US, and Chile and published in JAMA showed that lower vaccination uptake, especially in individuals older than 60 years, was associated with COVID-19 mortality …
[Emphasis added.]
Ironically, a sizeable portion of Americans have come to regard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a champion doing battle against the trifecta of rapacious Big Pharma, the medical researchers slavishly dependent on Pharma funding, and the hapless bureaucrats at our regulatory agencies who capitulate to them. Yes, there is no denying that greed is ever-present in the healthcare economy—from Medicare and Medicaid fraud to fabulously excessive executive salaries, or the failures in Washington to prosecute that thievery, but as The Washington Post pointed out on February 21, 2024, there is too much money to be made exploiting the suffering and helplessness of families who are sick and desperate for cures:
It is probably not a stretch to imagine that Kennedy’s obsession with vaccines dovetailed with Donald Trump’s need to find ever more issues to distract us from the uncomfortable realities of his too-close relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the nonsensical tariffs he has needlessly imposed, the coming surge in health insurance prices, and the reality that the lower prices he constantly promised during the campaign are nowhere to be found. I am betting there are far more Americans concerned about the skyrocketing bills at their local supermarket than those looking forward to waltzing in the new Trump Ballroom.
Like Donald Trump, Kennedy has managed to convince many that he is a crusader dedicated to making life better for them. But like Donald Trump, Kennedy makes himself a hero at the expense of truth. Much like Donald Trump’s successful legal action against CBS, even as Kennedy claims to hold Big Pharma accountable, he often profits by pressuring them with lawsuits. And, in the process, he has raised millions for himself and Children’s Health Defense with multiple lawsuits.
According to The Washington Post:
Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., received $23.5 million in contributions, grants and other revenue in 2022 alone — eight times what it collected the year before the pandemic began — allowing it to expand its state-based lobbying operations to cover half the country …
And like his boss, enriched countless times as president with his crypto scams and influence peddling, Kennedy is determined to not let public service get in the way of making money. As National Public Radio reported on January 22, 2025:
According to NPR:
Kennedy will only collect the fees if Wisner Baum wins, and only for cases that aren’t against the United States or in which the United States isn’t a party and doesn’t have ‘a direct or substantial interest,’ according to the filings. ‘Pursuant to the referral agreement, I am entitled to receive 10% of fees awarded in contingency fee cases referred to the firm,’ Kennedy wrote in his signed ethics agreement. ‘I am not trying these cases, I am not an attorney of record for the cases, and I will not provide representational services in connection with the cases during my appointment to the position of Secretary.’ … If he becomes HHS secretary and continues to collect fees, he would be in a position to potentially profit from vaccine litigation while also regulating drugmakers and exercising authority over federal vaccine policy.
‘RFK Jr’s ethics agreement is inadequate because it doesn’t address the bias created by his continuing financial interest in the litigation against Merck,’ Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics wrote to NPR …
According to Kennedy’s personal financial disclosure report, he made $856,559 in referral fees from the law firm. That’s in addition to $326,056 in salary and benefits he earned from the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, an organization Kennedy chaired and that has been influential in the anti-vaccine movement. The nonprofit has filed nearly 30 federal and state lawsuits since 2020, including some that target the federal agencies he would oversee at HHS. Many of the legal actions taken by CHD challenged vaccines and public health mandates … The filing also shows Kennedy declared a $8,848,402 share of partnership profits from the law firm Kennedy and Madonna, LLP, which has been renamed Madonna and Madonna, LLP. The filing says he received his “final partnership payout in May 2024.’ He also made money from another law firm, publishing and various other fees for speaking and endorsements.
In fact, as for consequences, The Washington Post notes that Kennedy’s anti-vaccination crusade is spreading:
A wave of lawmakers who oppose vaccine requirements are winning elections for state legislatures amid a national drop in childhood vaccination rates and a resurfacing of preventable deadly diseases. The victories come as part of a political backlash to pandemic restrictions and the proliferation of misinformation about the safety of vaccines introduced to fight the coronavirus …
Now, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ascension to head of the Department of Health and Human Services and his determined opposition to mRNA vaccines and his commitment to limit their availability, he is limiting the kind of information that is available to the public. For example, the CDC once featured this important message on its webpage outlining vaccine safety: “Vaccines have never been safer than they are today.” But that webpage has moved and additional text has been added to dilute that previously unambiguous endorsement of vaccines:
To ensure the continued safety of the U.S. vaccination program, it is important to carefully assess the balance of benefits and risks of vaccination. Vaccines, like any medical product, can have side effects. For example, severe allergic reactions, though rare, can occur after vaccination. CDC monitors for a range of side effects after vaccination and acts quickly to notify the public of new findings or, in some cases, to remove a product from the market when needed.
Lost in all this are those with autism and their families who are trying to make sense of a disease that profoundly affects them but has become a political football and easily exploited. On November 2, 2025, The Washington Post published an article titled “This mom has three children with autism. She’s spent thousands on ‘false hope,’” stating, “The Paduchowski family’s costly pursuit of risky, unproven autism treatments shows how desperate families can be lured by the false promise of a cure.”
The Post writes:
Wrangling three children with autism consumed Dana Paduchowski’s days in a chaotic swirl, her weeks dissolving into a blur of routines and meltdowns. When the house finally quieted at night, the mother would stay awake for hours scouring the internet for a magic treatment that didn’t exist. Instead of finding answers, Paduchowski said, she constantly stumbled into expensive ‘rabbit holes of broken promises.’
Over the past few years, Paduchowski estimates, she and her husband have spent at least $30,000 on unproven alternative treatments for her children: An intravenous therapy to remove heavy metals from her son’s body. A clinic with hyperbaric oxygen chambers. Supplements, new diets and naturopathic doctors. While some helped in small ways, others made no difference. In a few cases, she said, her children became ‘sick and pale’ or regressed. ‘I just thought, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get this test, and then we’re gonna get results, and then we’re going to fix this one thing and then he’s going to talk and break out of his autism shell,’ she said on a recent afternoon standing in her kitchen, as 15-year-old Caleb, her oldest, jumped and flapped his arms to an episode of ‘Sesame Street’ blaring on the TV. ‘But none of that has ever happened,’ she said.
Paduchowski’s journey into unproven and sometimes risky treatments highlights how parents of autistic children frequently navigate a confounding mix of conflicting advice, purported ‘miracle’ treatments and false hope in a bid to improve symptoms of a mostly genetic disorder that has no cure. Experts say only behavioral therapy has been shown to address the core symptoms of the disorder, while medications, like antidepressants or antipsychotics, can help co-occurring symptoms such as anxiety or irritability. Now, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes autism a central focus of his ‘Make America Healthy Again’ agenda — and pushes unsubstantiated causes and cures in the process — Paduchowski said there’s a new layer of confusion on whom to trust and where to turn.
One of the great ironies is that Kennedy has taken direct aim at one of the only accomplishments of Donald Trump’s efforts against COVID-19: the development of the incredibly successful vaccine. The New York Times writes:
During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020, President Trump was warned by medical officials that the development of a vaccine that could turn the tide against Covid could be over a year away. For Mr. Trump, that timeline was not good enough. He demanded a faster program. The creation of that program, Operation Warp Speed, led to lifesaving vaccines that contained messenger RNA, or mRNA, a synthetic form of a genetic molecule that helps stimulate the immune system. Those vaccines are widely regarded in the scientific community as the quickest way to protect Americans against future threats, including viruses that could mushroom into a pandemic, or man-made menaces, like a bioweapons attack. Time has marched on and, apparently, so has Mr. Trump in his second term.
This week, the president all but shrugged off an announcement by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary and a longtime critic of vaccines, that a research division of his department had slashed $500 million in grants and contracts for work on mRNA vaccines.
‘That was now a long time ago, and we’re onto other things,” the president told reporters on Wednesday.’
[Emphasis added.]
As for their latest Tylenol nonsense, Nishad Okutoyi, writing for the October 30, 2025 issue of Johns Hopkins Newsletter, stated:
On Sept. 22, 2025, President Donald Trump, alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would be notifying physicians that the use of acetaminophen (Tylenol) by expectant mothers can be associated with a ‘very increased risk of autism.’ This announcement has been met with widespread criticism from the scientific community … For decades, the exact cause of autism has not been known due to the inherent complexity of the disorder, with a range of potential environmental and genetic causes. This announcement made on the causal link stirred widespread concern. Perhaps this is a déjà vu of the Wakefield report (false report linking autism to MMR vaccine). The claim just didn’t sound… well, sound.
In addition, Okutoyi noted:
In an email to The News-Letter, Dr. Joel Shulkin, an assistant professor of pediatrics and pediatrician in Pediatric Developmental Medicine at Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, criticized the reported correlation between Tylenol and autism.
‘Observing that a hurricane occurred on the same day as the Super Bowl does not mean the Super Bowl caused the hurricane (or vice versa) … Additionally, a February 2025 meta-analysis showed that most studies reporting correlations between Tylenol use and autism exhibited high selection bias, variability in selection, adjustment for potential confounders and unmeasured familial confounding. In addition, a major study published last year conducted on about 2.5 million Swedish children, including sibling case-controls, found no association of acetaminophen use during pregnancy with children’s risk of autism. Therefore, there is no evidence at this time that prenatal acetaminophen causes autism,’ Shulkin said.
[Emphasis added.]
So significant was the pushback from the medical community that Kennedy recently retreated:
Recently, Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, director of public health and chief epidemiologist at the New England Complex Systems Institute, addressed the issue of Tylenol and autism:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just folded. After months of fanning the flames of baseless fear about Tylenol and autism, he stood before the press last week and admitted that there’s ‘not sufficient’ evidence to claim that Tylenol causes autism. Translation: Trump’s top health official just walked back one of the most reckless claims to come out of this administration.
When RFK Jr. and Trump first told pregnant women that Tylenol causes autism, I sounded the alarm because this claim endangered babies and pregnant women. Fevers in pregnancy can cause miscarriages and birth defects, and acetaminophen remains one of the safest ways to control fever. The supposed links between prenatal acetaminophen and autism were based on small, uncontrolled studies that did not control for confounding factors. In large sibling-controlled studies that account for genetics and family environment, the Tylenol link to autism disappears. I was proud to testify as an expert witness in front of the Pennsylvania House to refute RFK Jr.’s lies. I made it clear that there’s a vast movement of Americans who demand that the government stand up for truth and science. And because of all of you, the Trump administration has been forced to tell the truth.
[Emphasis added.]
According to PennLive, Dr. David Mandell, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, also testified:
Mandell said ‘We have a Secretary of Health and Human Services who describes autistic people as devoid of words, who seems unaware of the breadth of the spectrum … We have calls for an autism registry that harken back to a time when eugenics was all the rage. We have confident promises from our federal administration to identify the causes and treatments of autism by the end of September … and these have led to the reckless pronouncement without meaningful evidence that acetaminophen causes autism and lupus or folinic acid can cure it.’ …
Mandell warned that the CDC staff has been decimated by the Trump administration; and many scientists have also resigned in protest … ‘The pronouncements we are hearing about acetaminophen causing autism are not coming from those career scientists in the CDC,’ Mandell said. ‘They are coming from political appointees within the Department of Health and Human Services. So to say that the CDC is saying that there’s a connection between acetaminophen and autism, I think is actually incorrect. It’s our Secretary of Health and Human Services who’s saying it.’
As for breaking up the MMR vaccine into three shots, Johns Hopkins noted:
The Trump administration has also called for the MMR vaccine to be broken out into three separate shots, and urged pharmaceutical companies to develop these monovalent measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines, which aren’t currently available in the U.S. Doing so would ‘falsely imply that there is something unsafe about giving the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines at the same time,’ Amesh Adalja, MD, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told USA Today. ‘And if you break them apart, there’s a much higher likelihood that a child’s going to miss one or two’ vaccinations …’
The misinformation seems to never end. Here is Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill adding to the nonsensical noise:
Thankfully, there are real doctors practicing medicine amongst us. Here is how one of them responded:
Finally, this definitive statement from the American Academy of Pediatricians Parenting Website:
It is time to ignore the faux doctors and the hucksters who pretend but know nothing about healthcare. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s oversized ego—his delusional insistence that he knows more than those who have been studying and treating disease for decades—has driven him to curtail cutting-edge, potentially life-saving medical research. He has fired hard-working, experienced public servants at the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration. That Donald Trump has enabled and empowered Kennedy to destroy their good works and prevent them from saving more lives in the future borders on the criminal. The two of them have the blood of those who died unnecessarily from COVID-19 on their hands. And they have only added to the burdens those with autism face as they try their best to navigate our increasingly hobbled healthcare system.
