Inside the crisis at Tylenol

The CEO behind Tylenol thought he'd found a way to work with the Trump administration. Then everything went off the rails.

- Peter Loftus, Alyssa Lukpat & Sara Ashley O'Brien

Tylenol set the gold standard for corporate crisis management in 1982 after people died from taking its pain medication that had been tampered with and laced with cyanide.

(AP)

The chief executive of the company that makes Tylenol got a text message earlier this month that contained nothing but a single link to a Substack post.

In the post, a promoter of Covid-19 misinformation was connecting autism with acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.

The text was from the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

At that moment, it was clear to CEO Kirk Perry that his efforts to convince Kennedy that there was no science behind such claims had failed.

On Monday, Perry faced a full-blown crisis. In an extraordinary public announcement that contradicted widespread medical consensus and even his own top health advisers, President Trump warned that acetaminophen is a potential cause of autism, and urged expecting mothers to “tough it out” without the drug if they could. “Taking Tylenol is not good,” the president told the world as Kennedy, the Health and Human Services secretary, looked on.

That claim has sent the medical establishment into panic mode. And it’s thrown Kenvue, the company that makes Tylenol, into crisis—just 70 days into Perry's tenure as CEO.

Tylenol set the gold standard for corporate crisis management in 1982 after people died from taking its pain medication that had been tampered with and laced with cyanide. In a case now studied by business students and companies everywhere, the brand won back public trust with a quick recall, a redesign of its bottles to be tamper-resistant, and lots of coupons.