Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized the media on Friday for coverage of statements he made linking Tylenol given to infant boys after circumcision to autism, which sparked a public debate about the practice.
The comments in question came during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday during a brief exchange with President Donald Trump regarding the announcement they made together last month on the link between pregnant mothers taking acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and autism.
During the meeting, Kennedy referenced two studies, saying that they indicate that “children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, and it’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol.”
Multiple outlets reported Kennedy’s statements with headlines alluding to Kennedy directly linking autism to circumcision, rather than the Tylenol given to the infant boys following the procedure.
Friday afternoon, Kennedy posted on X that “the mainstream media attacks me for something I didn’t say in order to distract from the truth of what I did say.”
“So once again, [mainstream media] chooses to character assassinate me instead of educating Americans by digging into the science,” Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy’s Friday message included a link to a paper published on preprints.org this year that argues that oxidative stress due to prenatal or infant exposure to acetaminophen “triggers many if not most cases of autism spectrum disorder.”
The study published on preprints has not been peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal, but there have been several studies on whether there is a link between autism, acetaminophen exposure, and infant male circumcision.
The most prominent study, which Kennedy also referenced in his Friday X post, from the Danish Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, looked at nearly 343,000 boys born from 1994 to 2003. The authors of that paper found that “boys who undergo ritual circumcision may run a greater risk” of autism and hyperactivity disorders.
The 2025 preprint paper Kennedy cited heralded the Danish 2015 study as the “most compelling ‘standalone’ evidence that acetaminophen is a developmental neurotoxin.”
Kennedy’s comments on Tylenol use for infant circumcision sparked an online debate about the practice itself, with several anti-circumcision activist groups, such as Inaction, praising Kennedy’s comments.
“We cut healthy babies, dose them with Tylenol, & call it tradition,” Intaction said in an X post praising Kennedy’s Cabinet meeting statement. “It’s time to stop normalizing this & place children’s health & autonomy first.”
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) posted on X on Thursday shortly after the Cabinet meeting that Kennedy’s statement was “an antisemitic remark,” because infant circumcision is an essential part of the Jewish faith.
“I call on all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to clearly denounce it,” Nadler said.
Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor and vaccine scientist at Texas Medical Center, characterized Kennedy on X as “increasingly untethered to reality.”
On Friday afternoon, Hotez reshared Kennedy’s X statement, saying that Kennedy has “got to stop this nonsense.”
“There’s an old saying: when you find yourself in a hole, your first action is to stop digging. I guess he didn’t get the message,” Hotez said.
RFK JR. CITES CIRCUMCISION IN DEFENDING TYLENOL-AUTISM LINK
Circumcision rates in the United States have steadily declined over the past several decades, from a high of 65% of male babies in 1981 to only about 49% of male neonates in 2022.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one in 31 children aged 8 years old, about 3% of children, has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Autism is more than three times more common in boys than in girls.
