STUDIES have shown a link between using paracetamol during pregnancy and autism in children, US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr Martin Makary has said.
Speaking on The Late Show Live on GB News, he said: “We have a massive autism epidemic. It’s gone up 500% in the last several decades. It was rare a generation ago, you just didn’t see people with these repetitive motions and tics and completely non-verbal, you still don’t see it in anyone over the age of 60.
“So what’s going on? Something is happening. And so we did an extensive evaluation of the research, we found a couple plausible mechanisms, and we felt compelled immediately to let people know as we discovered things, and one of those things was that autism has been associated with pregnant women taking acetaminophen [paracetamol].
“And we also identified a mechanism by which the receptor for folate, which is vitamin B9, was blocked by an autoimmune disease in some kids with autism. And there is a therapy that we’re approving in two to three weeks whereby that pathway can be bypassed and kids can have noticeable clinical improvement 20% to 50% of the time, and so we hope hundreds of thousands of kids will benefit from this new treatment called leucovorin.”
Asked how rigorous the research was, he said: “Remember, for 15 years the medical establishment said that opioids are not addictive. For 50 years, the medical establishment said saturated fat causes heart disease when no evidence found that to be true.
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“And for 15 plus years, the American Academy of Pediatrics told infants to avoid a touch of peanut butter, thinking it would prevent peanut allergies, when in fact, it ignited the largest peanut epidemic allergy problem in UK and US history.
“So we have to be careful when we rely on the groupthink of the medical establishment. We saw during Covid, they ignored natural immunity, pushed cloth masks on toddlers and, in the US, kept schools closed for nearly two years.
“The evidence is pretty substantial, and remember, most low-grade fevers do not need any treatment anyway. Even without this concern, a fever may be a body’s natural way of ridding an infection.
“One research study from Johns Hopkins, my former institution, found that when you treat a fever, you actually prolong the duration of illness in a child. But there were 27 studies recently reviewed in a Harvard Mount Sinai report that was published that pointed to this association, and I’ll just read to you a quote from the Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health.
“Quote, ‘there is a causal relationship between prenatal acetaminophen use and the neurodegenerative disorders of ADHD and autism spectrum disorder’. That’s enough for me. Shouldn’t we play it on the side of safety when it comes to our nation’s kids and in the context of an expanding epidemic, where we otherwise have no other plausible cause.”
