It was so outrageous that, on learning of it, Wes Streeting, the UK Health Secretary, immediately dispensed with the kid gloves that his government have worn out of geopolitical necessity in its relationship with the rogue resident of the White House and advised that “there is no evidence to link the use of paracetamol by pregnant women to autism in their children, None”. Streeting went on to proclaim “don’t pay any attention whatsoever to what Donald Trump says about medicine. In fact, don’t even take my word for it as a politician - listen to British doctors, British scientists, the NHS.”
Streeting’s headline making claim was complemented by a “flood the airwaves” strategy he and his Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) which they had begun to assemble the previous day. Weighing in was the National Autistic Society which criticised “the incessant misinformation about autism from President Trump and {US Health Secretary} Robert F. Kennedy Jr,''which would undermine decades of research and leave autistic people dismayed and frightened.'' These responses aligned with those issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and leading medical bodies in the US.[1]
However, the ongoing tragedy for those concerned with the resilience of public health systems be they medical practitioners, administrators, patients and friends and relatives of, is that the aforementioned politicians, Trump and RFK, Jr are listened to, whether in frightened hesitancy or with religious type devotion. For, as the old adage goes, when America sneezes the rest of the word catches a cold. In the case of health misinformation, America, or its wellness woo sector at any rate, has acted as a superspreader of the Post-Truth element of the Triple P virus. Last week’s Tylenol furore represents a concatenation of a number of regressive themes in health discourse: the disempowerment of women as autonomous actors in their pregnancy journey; the sanctification of “natural” processes over any sort of medical intervention; the pathologisation of autism as a disease to be “ cured” rather than the independent validation of those on the autistic (or wider neurodivergent) spectrums; the related “refrigerator mother” stereotype and the promotion of the “individual responsibility” theme in one’s health journey over public health provision.
It's Mum’s Fault Always
If men by some miracle could be pregnant, can you imagine the most powerful person in the world equipped with the least capacity for scientific knowledge of any world leader encouraging them to “tough out” during pregnancy? The answer to this brief thought experiment is in 99.99% of probabilities with no margin for error is rhetorical. Safe to say that at this moment anxiety and pain in pregnancy is not within the realm of the lived experiences of Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Mehmet Oz, former talk show host and head of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services who all announced, on the basis of a spurious link with childhood autism, that pregnant women should cease taking paracetamol (known as acetaminophen or the brand name Tylenol in the US).
The political theatre surrounding Trump’s announcement forms part of the wider societal and longer historical background concerning women’s health. Pregnant women and their babies are routinely let down by partial, poor quality and missing medical evidence. Trump’s admonition “if you can’t tough it out “as a pregnant woman leaves them with treating their own pain and fever as their only option. This mistaken and cruel advice sets up a conflict between women’s needs against the best interests of their baby, rather than acknowledging the interdependence of women and foetus.[2]
It is almost moot to point out that analysis in Sweden in 2024 of a dataset of 2.5 million women who gave birth and their babies, found no association between paracetamol use in pregnancy and childhood neurodiversity. After additionally factoring in known risk factors for autism, the indication for taking paracetamol and family history of neurodiversity, a childhood autism risk from paracetamol exposure was not identified. Needless to say, Trump made no reference to this or any other contradictory evidence to his conclusion. I say moot in relation to the above study as many women, regardless of any scepticism towards the Trump administration’s approach to science, will feel burdened and anxious about baseless concerns about the effects of their choices on their pregnancy.[3] The delivery of misinformation will cause harm as pregnancy can be a state of anxiety with a heightened vigilance to protect the growing baby.[4] The anxiety quotient of pregnant women in the US will be increased by the advice from the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine that leaving the conditions of fever and pain can carry “significant maternal and infant health risks.”[5]
Trump’s fallacious claim contributes to the broader undermining of trust in science and the medical establishment which has further adverse impacts on the health of pregnant women. As Professor Sarah Hawkes, the co-founder of Global Health 50/50, a gender equality research initiative, says:
However, the ongoing tragedy for those concerned with the resilience of public health systems be they medical practitioners, administrators, patients and friends and relatives of, is that the aforementioned politicians, Trump and RFK, Jr are listened to, whether in frightened hesitancy or with religious type devotion. For, as the old adage goes, when America sneezes the rest of the word catches a cold. In the case of health misinformation, America, or its wellness woo sector at any rate, has acted as a superspreader of the Post-Truth element of the Triple P virus. Last week’s Tylenol furore represents a concatenation of a number of regressive themes in health discourse: the disempowerment of women as autonomous actors in their pregnancy journey; the sanctification of “natural” processes over any sort of medical intervention; the pathologisation of autism as a disease to be “ cured” rather than the independent validation of those on the autistic (or wider neurodivergent) spectrums; the related “refrigerator mother” stereotype and the promotion of the “individual responsibility” theme in one’s health journey over public health provision.
It's Mum’s Fault Always
If men by some miracle could be pregnant, can you imagine the most powerful person in the world equipped with the least capacity for scientific knowledge of any world leader encouraging them to “tough out” during pregnancy? The answer to this brief thought experiment is in 99.99% of probabilities with no margin for error is rhetorical. Safe to say that at this moment anxiety and pain in pregnancy is not within the realm of the lived experiences of Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Mehmet Oz, former talk show host and head of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services who all announced, on the basis of a spurious link with childhood autism, that pregnant women should cease taking paracetamol (known as acetaminophen or the brand name Tylenol in the US).
The political theatre surrounding Trump’s announcement forms part of the wider societal and longer historical background concerning women’s health. Pregnant women and their babies are routinely let down by partial, poor quality and missing medical evidence. Trump’s admonition “if you can’t tough it out “as a pregnant woman leaves them with treating their own pain and fever as their only option. This mistaken and cruel advice sets up a conflict between women’s needs against the best interests of their baby, rather than acknowledging the interdependence of women and foetus.[2]
It is almost moot to point out that analysis in Sweden in 2024 of a dataset of 2.5 million women who gave birth and their babies, found no association between paracetamol use in pregnancy and childhood neurodiversity. After additionally factoring in known risk factors for autism, the indication for taking paracetamol and family history of neurodiversity, a childhood autism risk from paracetamol exposure was not identified. Needless to say, Trump made no reference to this or any other contradictory evidence to his conclusion. I say moot in relation to the above study as many women, regardless of any scepticism towards the Trump administration’s approach to science, will feel burdened and anxious about baseless concerns about the effects of their choices on their pregnancy.[3] The delivery of misinformation will cause harm as pregnancy can be a state of anxiety with a heightened vigilance to protect the growing baby.[4] The anxiety quotient of pregnant women in the US will be increased by the advice from the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine that leaving the conditions of fever and pain can carry “significant maternal and infant health risks.”[5]
Trump’s fallacious claim contributes to the broader undermining of trust in science and the medical establishment which has further adverse impacts on the health of pregnant women. As Professor Sarah Hawkes, the co-founder of Global Health 50/50, a gender equality research initiative, says:
Pregnant women are already bombarded with a host of unsubstantiated information . . . (which) . . . “feeds into a narrative of distrust in science, which is really dangerous for women’s health, particularly in pregnancy.
Furthermore, for parents of autistic children, Hawkes adds, “you’ve introduced a huge amount of stigma and guilt when the scientific evidence just doesn’t bear that out.”[6]
Discouraging paracetamol use risks pushing women towards unlicenced treatments or alternative analgesia such as ibuprofen, which unlike paracetamol, poses proven risks in different trimesters, including miscarriage and kidney damage. For the doctor and psychiatry academic specialist Kate Womersley, the controversy around Trump’s Tylenol announcement is an opportunity to address the lacunae in medical research around the exclusion of pregnant women in studies of safety of medicines in pregnancy. To this end she and Ed Mullins, an obstetrician, are collaborating on Message Maternity - a project to bring together healthcare researchers, research funders, medicine regulators, legal experts, and medical publishers and, most importantly, women themselves, to understand why those who are pregnant are routinely excluded from research, and how this culture can be changed.[7]
If there is a unifying theme running through Trumpian discourse on health, then it is the fetishisation of the ‘natural.’ They myth of what is ‘natural’ undergirds the renaissance of conservative ideas about the existential purpose of women into which Trump’s narrative feeds. This is often based on a fantasy of an evolutionary past, tradwife milking a cow or baking cookies, living under white male supremacy. The ‘natural’ order of things in this milieu could mean death in childbirth, and deadly diseases, such as measles and whooping cough.[8]
Such a ‘back to the future’ scenario for American women, if a ‘The Handmaids Tale’ one has become that bit more realistic since the removal of the Roe v Wade constitutional right to abortion in 2022 which Trump proudly “killed” and which has meant that women living in states where abortion is banned – including in cases of rape and incest – are more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth. The widespread cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH) science and research grants will prevent scientists from working in such areas as perinatal mental health, women’s health and improving racial inequalities. In her book Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy and Childhood Lucy Jones finds that the average cost of having a baby in the US is around $19,000 and any kind of complication can raise that cost enormously.[9]
The ”appeal to nature”, or the idea that everything from the earth is better than anything human-made powers much of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement of which Kennedy is the effective high priest.[10] Coated with a patina of faux libertarian concerns about bodily choice and the Deep State and faux radicalism over the iniquity of Big Pharma, the longest and most persistent bete noire of MAHA and its ideological predecessors is vaccination. Similar dynamics can be observed in the Catholic Church’s traditional opposition to artificial contraception and abortion on the grounds that it interferes with the natural course of pregnancy and the demonisation of ‘conspiracist’ and ‘globalist’ bodies such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation. It is hardly coincidental that moral and ethical opposition to contraception and abortion resided on the Church doctrine of Natural Law.
The explicitly sexist and patriarchal meaning of ‘natural’ in MAHA world is laid bare in the steps that the administration has taken to undermine pregnant women’s access to Covid vaccines and antidepressants. In May, Kennedy said that the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would no longer recommend that healthy pregnant women get Covid vaccinations. At a panel about antidepressant use during pregnancy hosted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), staffed by antidepressant sceptics, one panellist, a psychologist named Roger McFillin, offered this pearl of wisdom “Are women just naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely? Those are gifts, not symptoms of a disease.”[11]
Enter the theory of “maternal imagination”, which believed that pregnant women could change the foetus with their minds and thus congenital disorders were the fault of the mother, to Bruno Bettleheim’s “refrigerator mother” hokum which blamed “cold” mothers for giving their children autism, men saying stupid stuff based on their “feelings” is dangerous.[12]
The discursive meanings of the Trump’s administration’s drive to restrict pregnant women’s access to Tylenol from the steady drift in America towards autocracy in the age of Trump 2.0. Authoritarian governments have always sought to “naturalise” the construction of pregnancy in order to subjugate women and ensure they are reliable sources of reproduction. That’s why the Tylenol announcement cannot be divorced from the Trump administration’s encouragement of women, in the manner of Viktor Orban regime in Hungary, to have more babies through $5,000 (£3,700) “baby bonuses”. This pronatalist agenda means in the words of Amy Larocca, author of a forthcoming book analysing the genderised, racialised and classist dynamics of the wellness industry titled How to be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, that in the midst of all “this pressure to become a mother … emerging politically … you’re not supposed to need any help or support. No maternity leave, no medical care, no support.”[13] Truly if men could get pregnant …
The Political Economy And Global Effects Of RFK Jr’s Great American Health Wrecking Ball
Related to the ill-disguised war on women’s health needs and agency that the Tylenol announcement is the macro agenda for the dismantling of public health provision in the US that RFK Jr as Health Secretary is presiding over. It is also a case study of the intersection of wellness woo capitalism with the deregulatory regime in health that RFK, Jr is implementing.
As a former chair of the anti-vaccine, non-profit Children’s Health Defence (CHD), anti-vaxxers were salivating for his appointment as Health Secretary but hardliners were angered when he settled on Tylenol as a “cause” of autism rather than more traditional targets such as aluminium, thimerosal or MMR. However, an Observer investigation reveals that Kennedy and other close associates of Trump have been critical of acetaminophen for years and have cultivated deep connections to organisations that sell or promote “natural” pain relief and who could benefit financially if women turned away from Tylenol towards unproven remedies.[14]
The CHD has spent years raising concerns that Tylenol could increase autism risk, both in pregnancy and during early years. CHD has also received funding from supplement companies selling non-medical pain relief. These included Earthley Wellness, an Ohio-based company which sells a “pain potion” containing “absolutely no acetaminophen … or other junk.” [15]
Earthley has donated at least $5,000 to the CHD and published a blog titled''10 Reasons You Should Reconsider Using Acetaminophen.'' CHD also received sponsorship from Dr Green Mom, another supplement company which recommends pregnant women take magnesium or ginger instead. While certain herbs have been found to treat pain, there is little evidence to validate all-purpose “potions” like Earthey’s offering.[16]
The nexus of connections between Kennedy, his close circle and the Trump administration to non-medical treatments grows and thickens. Last December, Kennedy transferred ownership of the trademark application for his slogan Make America Healthy Again to a company managed by Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaxxer who ran Kennedy’s 2024 presidential election campaign. Bigtree’s company has since applied to expand the trademark to use MAHA branding to sell vaccines, supplements, and vitamins. “It does appear that women who take Tylenol have a higher risk of autism,” Bigtree opined in a 2022 video.[17]
“America’s doctor,'' Dr Mehmet Oz, who flanked Trump last week and who was chosen by Trump to run the federal agency overseeing the Medicare and Medicaid services also was a “global adviser and stakeholder” for the global e-commerce supplement company iHerb. Oz heavily promoted iHerb’s “natural” pain relief formulas and other products on social media while running TV segments with titles such as “Hidden Acetaminophen Danger.” In the 24 hours after Trump’s announcement web search interest in iHerb spiked though Dr Oz has appeared to row back on Trump’s claim by telling an interviewer that women should “take it when it’s appropriate”.[18]
Once again, the web of links of anti-vaccine activists from Andrew Wakefield to the Disinformation Dozen who flooded the internet with falsehoods about Covid vaccines during the pandemic to the snake oil economy of bogus health supplements and alternative medicinal practices and the monetisation of lies and misinformation to the latest autism “cure” has been laid bare by proper investigative journalism. But in another example of the degradation of the genuinely great American institution; the rest of the world suffers from the Make America Sick Again (for those dependent on public health functioning). The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), founded in 1946 and which played such as a critical role in the eradication of smallpox, almost wiping out of polio, containment of the Ebola virus in Africa and in dealing with the HIV/AIDS crisis, faces a hollowing out to such an extent that it is no longer capable of protecting America from the next pandemic say staff.[19]
Since assuming control of the FDA, National Institutes of Health and the CDC in February, Kennedy has cut US support or Gavi, which distributes vaccines to the world’s poorest children; cut the CDC’s HIV prevention programmes and sacked the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, which draws up the agency’s list of recommended vaccines, and replaced it with a handpicked panel and in August he fired Susan Monarez, the CDC’s director , who said she was sacked “for holding the line on scientific integrity.”[20]
Dismissed for holding the line scientific or legal or historical or epistemic integrity or integrity in all conceivable walks of life. A suitable epitaph for the country that freely choose to take the path leading to autocracy and state sanctioned ignorance and obscurantism.
References
[1] Denis Campbell, ‘People trust authority.’ Experts fight back against Trump’s false health advice.’ The Guardian. 27th September 2025.
[2] Kate Womersley, 'Trump’s autism claims exploit pregnancy fears.' The Guardian, 27th September 2025.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Lucy Jones. 'First they came for the paracetamol – will epidurals be next?' The Observer, 28th September 2025.
[5] Carter Sherman, 'Unfounded claim is latest move in effort to glorify the ‘natural’ – often at the expense of women.' The Guardian, 27th September 2025.
[6] Hannah Devlin & Ian Semple. 'Factcheck Maternal painkiller use and autism in children.' The Guardian. 24th September 2025 p.13.
[7] Kate Wormersley, op cit.
[8] Lucy Jones, op cit.
[9] Lucy Jones, op cit.
[10] Carter Sherman, op cit.
[11] Sherman, op cit.
Discouraging paracetamol use risks pushing women towards unlicenced treatments or alternative analgesia such as ibuprofen, which unlike paracetamol, poses proven risks in different trimesters, including miscarriage and kidney damage. For the doctor and psychiatry academic specialist Kate Womersley, the controversy around Trump’s Tylenol announcement is an opportunity to address the lacunae in medical research around the exclusion of pregnant women in studies of safety of medicines in pregnancy. To this end she and Ed Mullins, an obstetrician, are collaborating on Message Maternity - a project to bring together healthcare researchers, research funders, medicine regulators, legal experts, and medical publishers and, most importantly, women themselves, to understand why those who are pregnant are routinely excluded from research, and how this culture can be changed.[7]
If there is a unifying theme running through Trumpian discourse on health, then it is the fetishisation of the ‘natural.’ They myth of what is ‘natural’ undergirds the renaissance of conservative ideas about the existential purpose of women into which Trump’s narrative feeds. This is often based on a fantasy of an evolutionary past, tradwife milking a cow or baking cookies, living under white male supremacy. The ‘natural’ order of things in this milieu could mean death in childbirth, and deadly diseases, such as measles and whooping cough.[8]
Such a ‘back to the future’ scenario for American women, if a ‘The Handmaids Tale’ one has become that bit more realistic since the removal of the Roe v Wade constitutional right to abortion in 2022 which Trump proudly “killed” and which has meant that women living in states where abortion is banned – including in cases of rape and incest – are more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth. The widespread cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH) science and research grants will prevent scientists from working in such areas as perinatal mental health, women’s health and improving racial inequalities. In her book Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy and Childhood Lucy Jones finds that the average cost of having a baby in the US is around $19,000 and any kind of complication can raise that cost enormously.[9]
The ”appeal to nature”, or the idea that everything from the earth is better than anything human-made powers much of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement of which Kennedy is the effective high priest.[10] Coated with a patina of faux libertarian concerns about bodily choice and the Deep State and faux radicalism over the iniquity of Big Pharma, the longest and most persistent bete noire of MAHA and its ideological predecessors is vaccination. Similar dynamics can be observed in the Catholic Church’s traditional opposition to artificial contraception and abortion on the grounds that it interferes with the natural course of pregnancy and the demonisation of ‘conspiracist’ and ‘globalist’ bodies such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation. It is hardly coincidental that moral and ethical opposition to contraception and abortion resided on the Church doctrine of Natural Law.
The explicitly sexist and patriarchal meaning of ‘natural’ in MAHA world is laid bare in the steps that the administration has taken to undermine pregnant women’s access to Covid vaccines and antidepressants. In May, Kennedy said that the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would no longer recommend that healthy pregnant women get Covid vaccinations. At a panel about antidepressant use during pregnancy hosted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), staffed by antidepressant sceptics, one panellist, a psychologist named Roger McFillin, offered this pearl of wisdom “Are women just naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely? Those are gifts, not symptoms of a disease.”[11]
Enter the theory of “maternal imagination”, which believed that pregnant women could change the foetus with their minds and thus congenital disorders were the fault of the mother, to Bruno Bettleheim’s “refrigerator mother” hokum which blamed “cold” mothers for giving their children autism, men saying stupid stuff based on their “feelings” is dangerous.[12]
The discursive meanings of the Trump’s administration’s drive to restrict pregnant women’s access to Tylenol from the steady drift in America towards autocracy in the age of Trump 2.0. Authoritarian governments have always sought to “naturalise” the construction of pregnancy in order to subjugate women and ensure they are reliable sources of reproduction. That’s why the Tylenol announcement cannot be divorced from the Trump administration’s encouragement of women, in the manner of Viktor Orban regime in Hungary, to have more babies through $5,000 (£3,700) “baby bonuses”. This pronatalist agenda means in the words of Amy Larocca, author of a forthcoming book analysing the genderised, racialised and classist dynamics of the wellness industry titled How to be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, that in the midst of all “this pressure to become a mother … emerging politically … you’re not supposed to need any help or support. No maternity leave, no medical care, no support.”[13] Truly if men could get pregnant …
The Political Economy And Global Effects Of RFK Jr’s Great American Health Wrecking Ball
Related to the ill-disguised war on women’s health needs and agency that the Tylenol announcement is the macro agenda for the dismantling of public health provision in the US that RFK Jr as Health Secretary is presiding over. It is also a case study of the intersection of wellness woo capitalism with the deregulatory regime in health that RFK, Jr is implementing.
As a former chair of the anti-vaccine, non-profit Children’s Health Defence (CHD), anti-vaxxers were salivating for his appointment as Health Secretary but hardliners were angered when he settled on Tylenol as a “cause” of autism rather than more traditional targets such as aluminium, thimerosal or MMR. However, an Observer investigation reveals that Kennedy and other close associates of Trump have been critical of acetaminophen for years and have cultivated deep connections to organisations that sell or promote “natural” pain relief and who could benefit financially if women turned away from Tylenol towards unproven remedies.[14]
The CHD has spent years raising concerns that Tylenol could increase autism risk, both in pregnancy and during early years. CHD has also received funding from supplement companies selling non-medical pain relief. These included Earthley Wellness, an Ohio-based company which sells a “pain potion” containing “absolutely no acetaminophen … or other junk.” [15]
Earthley has donated at least $5,000 to the CHD and published a blog titled''10 Reasons You Should Reconsider Using Acetaminophen.'' CHD also received sponsorship from Dr Green Mom, another supplement company which recommends pregnant women take magnesium or ginger instead. While certain herbs have been found to treat pain, there is little evidence to validate all-purpose “potions” like Earthey’s offering.[16]
The nexus of connections between Kennedy, his close circle and the Trump administration to non-medical treatments grows and thickens. Last December, Kennedy transferred ownership of the trademark application for his slogan Make America Healthy Again to a company managed by Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaxxer who ran Kennedy’s 2024 presidential election campaign. Bigtree’s company has since applied to expand the trademark to use MAHA branding to sell vaccines, supplements, and vitamins. “It does appear that women who take Tylenol have a higher risk of autism,” Bigtree opined in a 2022 video.[17]
“America’s doctor,'' Dr Mehmet Oz, who flanked Trump last week and who was chosen by Trump to run the federal agency overseeing the Medicare and Medicaid services also was a “global adviser and stakeholder” for the global e-commerce supplement company iHerb. Oz heavily promoted iHerb’s “natural” pain relief formulas and other products on social media while running TV segments with titles such as “Hidden Acetaminophen Danger.” In the 24 hours after Trump’s announcement web search interest in iHerb spiked though Dr Oz has appeared to row back on Trump’s claim by telling an interviewer that women should “take it when it’s appropriate”.[18]
Once again, the web of links of anti-vaccine activists from Andrew Wakefield to the Disinformation Dozen who flooded the internet with falsehoods about Covid vaccines during the pandemic to the snake oil economy of bogus health supplements and alternative medicinal practices and the monetisation of lies and misinformation to the latest autism “cure” has been laid bare by proper investigative journalism. But in another example of the degradation of the genuinely great American institution; the rest of the world suffers from the Make America Sick Again (for those dependent on public health functioning). The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), founded in 1946 and which played such as a critical role in the eradication of smallpox, almost wiping out of polio, containment of the Ebola virus in Africa and in dealing with the HIV/AIDS crisis, faces a hollowing out to such an extent that it is no longer capable of protecting America from the next pandemic say staff.[19]
Since assuming control of the FDA, National Institutes of Health and the CDC in February, Kennedy has cut US support or Gavi, which distributes vaccines to the world’s poorest children; cut the CDC’s HIV prevention programmes and sacked the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, which draws up the agency’s list of recommended vaccines, and replaced it with a handpicked panel and in August he fired Susan Monarez, the CDC’s director , who said she was sacked “for holding the line on scientific integrity.”[20]
Dismissed for holding the line scientific or legal or historical or epistemic integrity or integrity in all conceivable walks of life. A suitable epitaph for the country that freely choose to take the path leading to autocracy and state sanctioned ignorance and obscurantism.
References
[1] Denis Campbell, ‘People trust authority.’ Experts fight back against Trump’s false health advice.’ The Guardian. 27th September 2025.
[2] Kate Womersley, 'Trump’s autism claims exploit pregnancy fears.' The Guardian, 27th September 2025.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Lucy Jones. 'First they came for the paracetamol – will epidurals be next?' The Observer, 28th September 2025.
[5] Carter Sherman, 'Unfounded claim is latest move in effort to glorify the ‘natural’ – often at the expense of women.' The Guardian, 27th September 2025.
[6] Hannah Devlin & Ian Semple. 'Factcheck Maternal painkiller use and autism in children.' The Guardian. 24th September 2025 p.13.
[7] Kate Wormersley, op cit.
[8] Lucy Jones, op cit.
[9] Lucy Jones, op cit.
[10] Carter Sherman, op cit.
[11] Sherman, op cit.
[12] Jones, op cit.
[13] Sherman, op cit.
[14] Alexi Mostrous, 'Trump sounds false alarm on pain relief drug – and Kennedy’s allies look set to profit.' The Observer. 28 September 2025 pp.16-17.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Stephen Armstrong & Ada Barume, 'Kennedy’s staff warn that he is dismantling US public health.' The Observer. 28 September 2025 p.15
[20] Ibid.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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