Trump's autism claims aren't just wrong, they're dangerous

A few years ago, I was crossing the playground at school when a fellow parent caught up to me to talk about the flu vaccine, which is offered every year to primary school-aged kids in Britain.

- VICTORIA RICHARDS

“I’m just not sure about it,” she said in a lowered voice, looking worried. “And vaccines in general. Don’t some of them cause autism?”

At the time, I had a hard time rearranging my face into something less reminiscent of a grimace - or an overt eye-roll. But perhaps it wasn’t her fault: you only have to look at the madness on social media platforms like X to see the anti-vax brigade out in force, spluttering nonsense about the Covid vaccine and the MMR (for measles, mumps and rubella).

The real culprit (in the latter case), of course, is Andrew Wakefield - the disgraced former doctor and fraudster struck off after making the false claim in 1998 that the MMR vaccine was linked to developmental disorders such as autism. Fast forward 25 years or so and his unsavoury legacy persists as a dangerous and destructive urban legend. It has led directly – helped massively by Donald Trump’s administration, which is presiding over the US’s largest outbreak of measles in 25 years – to a worrying rise in measles cases in this country; even deaths.

And now we have Donald “inject bleach to cure Covid” Trump, making a pointless, false and downright dangerous claim about a link between Tylenol - better known in the UK as paracetamol – and autism, contrary to all medical guidelines.

In a meandering press conference lasting more than an hour last night, Trump said there had been a “meteoric” rise in autism, which he said was “among the most alarming public health developments in history”, and urged pregnant women to “tough it out” and refrain from taking Tylenol, an over-the-counter painkiller sold in the UK as paracetamol, as he claimed it was linked to autism.