Open Thread

In 2025 a meta-analysis of 46 prospective studies was performed regarding the use of Tylenol during pregnancy and ADHD, autism and neurodevelopmental disorders.
The authors were from Harvard and other universities.
The findings were:
“Higher-quality studies were more likely to show positive associations. Overall, the majority of the studies reported positive associations”

“Previous systematic reviews and meta analyses[10,11,12,13,14,15], have examined the association” and found similar results.

Dose dependent relationships were found:
“Dose response: 10% higher odds for each doubling of acetaminophen”
“2nd tertile: OR = 2.14 (95% CI: 0.93–5.13) 3rd tertile: OR = 3.62”
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-025-01208-0

Here is how the “experts” recently reported this when RFK/Trump brought it up.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02876-1

“There is no definitive evidence”

For some people 5+ meta-analyses including 46 prospective studies would “suggest” otherwise.

When the vaccine funded IOM looked for evidence vaccines in infancy don’t cause autism they could only find 1 study and it showed the opposite.
When the worlds leading vaxxers Stanley Plotkin and Katherin Edwards were under oath and asked if there were any studies showing these vaccines don’t cause autism their answer was no.
I wonder if the “experts” want to apply the same standard of “definitive evidence” to the pharma products they make money from?

“and when you see any associations, they are very, very small,”

Is a 51% increased “very, very small”?
Is a 3.62 increased rate “very, very small”?

Using this “expert” definition smoking has a “very, very small association” with heart attacks. Likewise, asbestos has a “very, very small association” with cancer.

The “no definitive evidence” line seems familiar because it’s such a common industrial propaganda cliché that Hollywood jokes about it.

“Gentlemen, practice these words in front of the mirror: Although we are constantly exploring the subject, currently there is no direct evidence”
–Tobacco propagandist Nick Naylor from the movie “Thank you for smoking”

“The evidence does not support a causal link”
“Suggesting otherwise may fuel misinformation and undermine confidence”

Maintaining “confidence” in the trillion dollar medical industry this “experts” income depends on is what is really important.

Half way through the article we finally get to any discussion of any evidence. This is a common propaganda strategy, start with a bunch of insults, logical fallacies and substanceless rhetoric to condition and bias the audience.

They mention the Ahlquivist 2024 study.
If you bother to go read table 4 in the meta-analysis, Ahlquivist was literally the lowest quality and most biased study on the topic. All the authors also happened to work at a pharma funded institute.
The study still found Tylenol was associated with increased autism, ADHD and NDD though it was “a “very small” difference”

Next they mention a Japanese study. The Nature article states it “found no link between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and autism.”
If you don’t trust the experts you might go to the study and read “hazard ratios of 1.08 (95% CI: 1.00, 1.16) for composite neurodevelopmental outcomes, 1.22 (95% CI: 1.09, 1.36) for ADHD, 1.06 (95% CI: 0.98, 1.15) for ASD,”
A bit different than “no link” but don’t mention it because that would be “misinformation” that would “undermine confidence” in pharma products.

If you’re curious how that “no link” came about they ran a bunch of different models and adjustments to the data: “Similar findings were observed in adjusted models and IPTW methods” Those found a link as well, but alas they eventually ran a model and adjusted the data to find a result closer to what they wanted.
That’s how “expert” science is done. Run a bunch of models, plug in a bunch of assumptions and adjustments and when you find a result that supports your income keep it and throw out the rest. Then ad hominem anyone who points it out.

Finally the article gets to the meta-analysis. They devout two sentences to it one of which is to reject it because an analysis done by people paid by
“Amgen, Bristol Myers Squibb, UCB, GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi, Leo, Sun, Regeneron, Janssen, Takeda, Gilead, Novartis, Gerber Foundation” conclude:
“in utero exposure to acetaminophen is unlikely to confer a clinically important increased risk”
“Most studies that have reported positive findings are difficult to interpret”
“When unobserved familial confounding through sibling analysis was controlled for, associations weakened”

Think about what that means in the context of a conflict of interest analysis that cannot be viewed. “important increased risk”, “studies reported positive findings”, and “associations weakened” after “unobserved” confounders were “controlled for”

The Nature article then goes to quote –I shit you not– a spokesperson for the corporation that manufactures Tylenol.

There sure is misinformation and undermining confidence here.
——

“dogma always comes with a set of though-terminating clichés, which help believers hide their close-mindedness–mainly from themselves.” — Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined minds.

“Truth is a pathless land –the moment you follow (experts) you cease to follow truth.” –-Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Once men turned their thinking over to (experts) in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with (experts) to enslave them.” –Dune

And, Argentina scrapped its export tax on soy beans. This allowed China to shift soy bean purchases from the USA to Argentina. Thereby hurting American farmers. And Argentina is getting rewarded for hurting American farmers. This is nothing more than a bailout for hedge funds.

Re: Tucker Carlson and 9/11; Comey & Russiagate Origins; COVID-19 misinformation Social Media Moderation/Censorship; etc.

When I was just a wee little news junkie in the 1970s, the television evening news was a half-hour (it had expanded in the mid-1960s from 15 minutes) and that seemed adequate. We knew who was President, who had won WWII, who had landed on the moon and all that important stuff. We knew assassins had three names and were learning that conspiracy theories rot the brain.

When we found out stuff, that was that. Watergate and the investigations and Impeachment inquiry that followed unfolded at what seems in retrospect, a stately pace. Sure, now we know the Gulf of Tonkin Incident did not really happen and even back then, many suspected FDR knew in advance about Pearl Harbor. But, I think most people shared a common reality about most political things, even if they evaluated policies and personalities differently.

Now, things are a bit different. Every important news event comes wrapped in at least one but often several competing narratives. People “do their own research”, even doing detailed detective work on photographs and video, or plowing through statistics or through published scientific research, looking for still another narrative “truth”. People can doom-scroll for hours on YouTube or Substack. (I know this from personal experience.)

A lot of what passes for news is a continuing clash of competing narratives and some of these narratives are purposely generated extemporaneously by goldfish.

I, personally, find it difficult to even form a view on controversies, where in the past, I would have enjoyed having a polished, well-informed opinion to share with unwary friends. The game changed and I missed the change. Now, the thing to do is to embrace and extend a narrative, not a mere opinion. The right narrative is like an application to join a club, if not a gang training for combat.

I do admit I try to take some pleasure in attempting to torment the most determined goldfish, but I am seldom successful. Today, I ran across a post somewhere complaining that Trump’s prosecution of Comey seemed partisan and set a bad precedent. I averred in a comment that Russiagate had seemed partisan. I was accused of being a bot! Apparently, any sign of intelligence indicates AI is involved.

I do not have an opinion about COVID-19 issues anymore, but I maybe an exception. I saw Taibbi critiquing how MSM, including the New York Times, handled Google’s admission that Biden Administration had pressured them to censor critics of Biden COVID policy and vaccine skeptics on YouTube. The NY Times could not quite admit that the “misinformation” removed might have been true (at least arguably more true than what Biden himself was saying about vaccines). Of course, that was then and this is now, so Trump warning off pregnant Tylenol users is so much worse than anything we goldfish can remember Biden doing.

Tucker Carlson is an odd case. He seems to like conspiracy theories. He has happily platformed Catherine Austin Fitts, for example. Alex Jones. He will talk about UFOs. I assume, like any good executive editor, he knows his audience and how to cultivate their ripening awareness. Where 9/11 is concerned, he has some undisputed pegs to hang is hat on: the big one is that Bush invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam on the strength of an implicit and false narrative that blamed, not the Saudis, but Iraq. I wrote more than one angry letter to the NY Times Public Editor complaining about columnist William Safire’s lies in support of that false narrative. So, if Tucker does wade into deep water, there is plenty of dry land to come back to.