President Donald Trump held one of his televised “cabinet meetings” from the White House on Thursday, which mostly serves as an opportunity for members of the Trump regime to fawn over the president in nauseating ways. But Trump’s health secretary took the opportunity to embarrass himself Thursday in a way that reminds us he’s grossly unqualified.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently held a press conference with Trump to declare that pregnant women should no longer take Tylenol during pregnancy, in an attempt to claim that it causes autism. Kennedy brought up the topic on Thursday, mentioning a TikTok video he saw.
“Somebody showed me a TikTok video of a pregnant woman at 8 months pregnant—she’s an associate professor at the Columbia Medical School—and she is saying ‘F Trump’ and gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta,” Kennedy said Thursday.
“The level of Trump Derangement Syndrome has now left the political landscapes and it is now a pathology,” Kennedy continued.
RFK Jr: “Somebody showed me a TikTok video of a pregnant woman at 8 months pregnant — she’s an associate professor at the Columbia Medical School — and she is saying ‘F Trump’ and gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta. The level of Trump Derangement Syndrome is now a pathology.”
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– Aaron Rupar (@atraupar.com) October 9, 2025 at 9:56 am
Putting aside for a moment the debate over Tylenol, any educated adult with two brain cells to rub together can see a big problem with what Kennedy just said.
As one doctor on Bluesky put it: “as a physician, I’ll note that if you have a fetus in your placenta then something has gone quite wrong indeed.” The placenta is an organ that grows in the uterus and provides nutrients transferred from the mother to the fetus. A fetus does not grow “in” a placenta, as Kennedy claimed on Thursday.
It’s not entirely clear what TikTok video Kennedy was referring to, but the Russian propaganda account RT posted a video Sept. 23 showing a woman who was taking Tylenol while 28 weeks pregnant. The video became popular on TikTok, and RT claims the woman is a “teaching doctor at New York’s Columbia University,” though the TikTok account has been set to private, and Gizmodo could not confirm the person’s employment.
The video shared by RT appears to show the woman taking just one pill and saying Tylenol “works like a charm and my baby won’t have autism.” She also doesn’t say “eff Trump.” The idea that pregnant women were “gobbling” Tylenol in large quantities was a meme among the far-right in the immediate aftermath of the press conference from Kennedy and Trump. But the videos that went viral largely appeared to show women taking one or two pills rather than “chugging” Tylenol as was so often claimed.
There were also unverified videos on TikTok and Instagram of people claiming that women were dying from overdosing on Tylenol as a way to oppose Trump. There’s no evidence that anyone overdosed on Tylenol as a way to stick it to Trump, despite what random people on social media have tried to claim.
What about this claim that she had a “baby in her placenta”? Kennedy’s ignorance of basic biological facts is disturbing, but not altogether surprising. As the son of former Attorney General Robert Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, the current health secretary has lived an existence of immense privilege that allowed him to coast through life. Kennedy, who was addicted to heroin for 14 years, has claimed that the drug helped him be a better student. But Kennedy is not nearly as bright as he thinks he is.
To give just one particularly galling example of his ignorance, the health secretary has written about the fact that he doesn’t believe in germ theory. Kennedy believes in something called miasma theory, which was popular in the early 19th century before science advanced to understand germs. As Ars Technica notes, Kennedy doesn’t even seem to understand miasma theory. And back in May, Kennedy posted photos of himself bathing in sewage-tainted water.
Kennedy also tried to suggest on Thursday that circumcision could be linked to autism because kids are given Tylenol after the procedure. Then he immediately backtracked and said “none of this is dispositive,” apparently admitting he was talking out of his ass and there was no definitive causation.
Besides linking Tylenol in pregnant women to autism, RFK Jr. now says circumcision is part of the reason why kids are autistic.
“Children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, and it’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol. None of this is positive…”
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– Justin Baragona (@ justinbaragona.bsky.Social) October 9, 2025 at 10:10 am
Kennedy, a long-time anti-vaccine activist, also accidentally admitted that he was trying to find studies to fit his agenda rather than actually following the science.
President Trump has assembled some of the most unqualified people who have ever served in government. And they’re all doing everything they can to dismantle the U.S., whether it’s deploying troops to invade U.S. cities, cutting a billion dollars in food for schools and food banks, or trying to abolish the Department of Education.
Trump will continue to chip away at everything Americans hold dear as long as he holds office. (Did you hear him declare that he had to “take away” freedom of speech yesterday?) And people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will continue to make idiotic statements that would’ve been fireable offenses in literally any other political era.
