Former US Surgeon General is spreading misinformation again: The new BMJ study does NOT conflict with the HHS advice to avoid Tylenol

Former US Surgeon General is spreading misinformation again, this time making the claim that we shouldn't research the link between Tylenol and autism any further: "Let's stop before we know!"

Nov 11, 2025

Executive summary

Former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams can’t seem to read a study correctly. He just posted this:

The main conclusion of the BMJ paper:

“Existing evidence does not clearly link maternal paracetamol use during pregnancy with autism or ADHD in offspring.”

But — and this is crucial — the BMJ paper authors also say:

“Confidence in the findings of the reviews was low to critically low... owing to the potential risk of bias and confounding in the included studies.”

This means that while they don’t claim a definitive causal relationship, they’re simultaneously acknowledging that the available studies are too unreliable to truly rule anything out.

So calling for a halt in studies at this point, which is what Adams is doing, is exactly the wrong thing to do until we are SURE we got it right and right now the evidence from the studies is very troubling.

What the underlying studies showed

The aggregate data across all studies show:

~25–35% increased relative risk of ADHD and ASD-related outcomes (across most analyses). How Dr. Adams thinks this is a nothing burger is beyond my comprehension.
Dose-response pattern (duration and intensity of use matter).
Plausible biological mechanism (hormonal disruption, neuroinflammation, depletion of antioxidant defenses in the fetal brain).\

In short, this is a very troubling signal and it’s been replicated enough times that we should be very concerned.

Full AI analysis

Here is the full AI analysis of the BMJ paper.

You’ll be impressed at the difference between what Jerome wrote and what each of the underlying studies showed.

Summary

Trusting former health officials like Jerome Adams is generally a mistake. Eric Topol is equally unreliable (he called the COVID vaccines one of mankind’s greatest triumphs).

They are incapable of correctly interpreting what studies are actually saying.

What we know from this study is:

There is repeated, consistent epidemiological and mechanistic evidence suggesting elevated neurodevelopmental risk from prenatal acetaminophen exposure.
The BMJ 2025 umbrella review did not refute that. It only emphasized methodological caution, partly to avoid the political fallout of admitting the world’s most commonly used “safe-in-pregnancy” drug may be neurotoxic to the developing brain.