President Donald Trump on Monday repeatedly urged pregnant women not to take acetaminophen, claiming that doing so is linked to a “very increased risk of autism.” His remarks—which immediately drew warnings and pushback from experts—contradicts leading medical advice that acetaminophen, when used properly, is safe during pregnancy.
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The President, who does not have a medical background, provided no new evidence to support his assertion, and many respected medical organizations—including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine—have rejected the claim, emphasizing that years of research have found no causal link between the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy and autism. Experts have also pointed out that acetaminophen helps manage pain and fever, both of which can be very dangerous to pregnant people and fetuses if left untreated. It is the only over-the-counter medication approved to treat fevers during pregnancy.
Trump, who has appointed several vaccine and climate change skeptics to key positions in his administrations, has made a number of other false and questionable claims about health and science over the years. Here are some of the most notable ones.
Read More: Trump Links Tylenol to Autism. What Does the Science Show?
COVID-19
Trump made numerous false claims related to the COVID-19 pandemic during his first term, including on many occasions downplaying the threat of the virus. In July 2020, for instance, he asserted that “99%” of the cases “are totally harmless”—which a majority of public-health experts and data, including from his Administration, had shown by then was not the case.
Trump made misleading comparisons between the virus and the flu as well, writing in a social media post in October 2020: “Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!” Extensive data and research conducted by health and science experts have shown that COVID-19 is deadlier and more contagious than influenza viruses.
The President also promoted unproven treatments for the virus, including suggesting that injecting disinfectant into the body could be a possible cure and proposing that researchers study whether hitting the body with “ultraviolet or just very powerful light” could help combat the virus. Doctors and public-health experts widely warned the public not to inject or ingest disinfectants, cautioning that doing so is dangerous.
In March 2020, Trump promoted chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, two antimalarial drugs, as possible treatments to the virus: “I think it could be something really incredible,” he said at the time. While he acknowledged that more research needed to be conducted, he also said that the drugs were showing “very, very encouraging results.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the country’s leading infectious disease expert, and other federal health officials pushed back on Trump’s remarks, emphasizing that there was no proven drug to treat the virus at the time, and that the two antimalarial drugs have potentially dangerous side effects.
Climate change
Trump has repeatedly denied the existence of climate change. In April 2022, he called it “a hoax;” the following year, he referred to it as “one of the greatest con jobs ever.” The overwhelming consensus among scientists, based on decades of research, is that the planet is warming and that the change is being caused by human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases.
Trump has also suggested that, because cold weather events are still taking place, climate change can’t be happening. But many climate scientists have discredited this argument, saying that freezing events can take place even amid climate change—but as time goes on, those cold events will happen less often and won’t last as long.
On Tuesday, Trump echoed his previous comments on climate change, calling it the “greatest con job ever perpetuated” and a “scam” while addressing the United Nations General Assembly.
The President has also made a number of false or misleading statements regarding renewable energy while pushing to expand the production of fossil fuels, the use of which has been identified as the main source of humans’ greenhouse gas emissions. A vocal opponent of wind power, Trump has, for instance, claimed without evidence that the noise from windmills causes cancer. Research has found no such link.
Read More: Here Are All of Trump’s Major Moves to Dismantle Climate Action
Vaccines
Soon after he was elected to his second term, Trump indicated that he would be open to changing the childhood vaccination schedule and suggested that there may be a link between vaccines and autism—a widely disproven claim.
“The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible,” Trump said in an interview for TIME’s 2024 Person of the Year. “If you look at things that are happening, there’s something causing it.”
In that interview, Trump didn’t explicitly state that vaccines cause autism, but he did say that his Administration would conduct “very serious testing.”
Earlier this month, Trump posted a video on social media that promoted the debunked connection. And during the same event on Monday where he contradicted medical experts with his claims about acetaminophen, the President again appeared to suggest a link between vaccines and autism, saying without providing evidence that “there are certain groups of people that don’t take vaccines and don’t take any pills that have no autism.”
Autism is diagnosed more often now than it has been in the past, which researchers widely attribute to changes in how autism is defined and diagnosed. The debunked claim that vaccines are tied to autism stems from a 1998 study by British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield in The Lancet, which has since been refuted by numerous studies. In 2010, The Lancet retracted the study; the journal’s editor called the study’s claims “utterly false.” Wakefield lost his U.K. medical license that same year, after officials said that he had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in conducting the research that led to its publication.
Trump has not opposed vaccines or promoted misinformation on the topic to the same extent as some in his party, and has at times praised their effectiveness—even as his Department of Health and Human Services, under the leadership of prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has made a number of recent changes to the country’s immunization policy that have alarmed experts. During the pandemic, in his first term, Trump oversaw the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines, an achievement he has touted on multiple occasions. Earlier this month, he said that some vaccines are “so amazing” and “just pure and simple work,” appearing to express reservations about Florida’s plan to eliminate all vaccine mandates in the state.
Abortion
Trump has made several misleading statements about abortion since launching his first presidential campaign in 2015.
Among them, he has claimed on multiple occasions that fetuses are killed just before birth or that babies are killed after they are born.
Abortions later in pregnancy are rare; less than 1% of abortions in 2021 occurred after 21 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Killing a baby after birth, meanwhile, would not be abortion but infanticide, which is illegal everywhere in the U.S.
Read More: What Trump Has Done on Reproductive Health Care In His First 100 Days
Gender-affirming care
Days after Trump was sworn in for a second time, he signed an Executive Order entitled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order refers to gender-affirming care as “chemical and surgical mutilation” and claims that such care relies on “junk science.”
Major respected medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, have endorsed gender-affirming care for transgender patients, as well as other people seeking it, and opposed efforts to restrict access, saying gender-affirming care is based on evidence and can be medically necessary.