On Monday, President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. put out a recommendation to the effect that pregnant women ought to stay away from taking Tylenol and other painkillers containing acetaminophen, on suspicion that it could be increasing the risk of autism in their unborn children.

As you can imagine, this set off a pretty sizable controversy, because the research isn’t really clear on what effect acetaminophen has on unborn babies. Some in the medical community say it isn’t the Tylenol that causes autism but instead the fever that a pregnant woman will take it for.

And there are a whole lot of people in the medical community who just reflexively defend every single prescription drug on the market. Because of course they do – it’s easy if you’re a doctor to just prescribe something to a patient that alleviates a condition, when you might otherwise have to really dig down to find out its cause (which is usually habit-related, as in diet or a lack of exercise, or some environmental condition which affects someone’s constitution).

And also because the drug companies are very, very loving toward the medical community. So much so that there is a growing public concern that the two have utterly corrupted each other.

Kennedy is in his current job largely because the Make America Healthy Again movement he kicked off as an independent presidential candidate helped carry the day for Trump when he attached it to Trump’s campaign, and MAHA is in very large part a re-examination of our approval of that chummy relationship between docs and drug companies.

Part of that, of course, is a skepticism of medical research funded by Big Pharma and whether it’s at all useful.

We’re not going to take a position on autism and acetaminophen. We don’t pretend to know. What we can say is there has been an alarming rise in autism diagnoses, and whether that’s a real change in conditions or simply a greater recognition of a pre-existing problem, it would still be a good thing to try to reduce the number of kids who have to fight through that problem. Autistic kids have a really tough row to hoe, and so do their parents.

And RFK Junior is trying to find answers. We don’t know if these are the right ones.

But after Monday’s press conference, out popped Louisiana’s senior senator for a fairly predictable reaction…

I understand and applaud President Trump’s desire to address this issue and to support HHS. HHS should release the new data that it has to support this claim. The preponderance of evidence shows that this is not the case. The concern is that women will be left with no options to…

— U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (@SenBillCassidy) September 22, 2025

Except there was this…

Yo, @SenBillCassidy – you paying attention? https://t.co/qbdn0Atc03

— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) September 24, 2025

Hoo, boy.

Just talking about the politics of this, because it’s entirely possible Cassidy is correct and Kennedy is wrong about the medicine, Cassidy isn’t going to help himself here.

He isn’t going to help himself because the public knows he’s taken better than $700,000 in campaign donations from Big Pharma, and as such he’s got a reputation for being in their pocket.

Maybe it isn’t fair, but it’s real. From a perception standpoint, Cassidy can’t criticize RFK Junior without it being seen as him shilling for Pharma or the medical establishment.

And in the wake of COVID, you just can’t mobilize a large amount of public support behind either one anymore.

If we were to give Cassidy advice, it would be to stay out of the MAHA controversies, because he’s just not going to make any headway with any of them. But of course, we’re in no position to advise him because we’ve already taken the position that Louisiana needs to move on to somebody fresher and more savvy.

He’d better hope his position on Tylenol holds up better than the one he took on impeaching President Trump in January of 2021. If it doesn’t, he’s probably going to need several bottles of the stuff to get him through this next election.