Weeks-Long Wrap Up: CDC Director Exposed for Politics at Senate Hearing, Tylenol Warning Finally Arrives

If you think you’re keeping up with the crazy news cycle, then you probably don’t really know what’s happening.

9 minute read

Sorry, I disappeared for a bit. I’ve been traveling for work and fun, and then had to focus on a big project. But I’m back. So let’s look at what happened in the last couple weeks.

First, fired CDC Director Susan Monarez got run over at a Senate hearing for playing politics while claiming, much like Fauci did, that she is the science. Second, we’ll take a look at the crazy news cycle that followed the White House briefing to announce something long known: Tylenol can be dangerous to a growing human fetus.

The Science™ Exposed as Politics

Senator Bill Cassidy held a September 17 hearing titled “Restoring Trust Through Radical Transparency” with fired CDC Director Susan Monarez. And boy did we get some transparency.

The morning of the hearing, I published a piece, here on The DisInformation Chronicle, noting that a leaked document of the powerful lobby Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) called Cassidy a “strategic voice and ally” while highlighting Monarez’s lawyers as Democratic Party operatives, who seemed to be running a squeeze play on the administration.

That piece I wrote on Monarez rocketed all over DC that morning. I heard back from one PR firm that they blasted it to every Member of the House and Senate, including all the health policy people on the Hill. The impact was huge.

During the hearing, Sen. Cassidy tried to position Susan Monarez as a pro-science federal employee standing up to big mean Health and Human Services Secretary, RFK Jr., but too many Senators weren’t having it. As I reported in the story that went out the morning of the hearing, Monarez has been working behind the scenes with two of the most notorious anti-Trump attorneys in DC—Abbe Lowell and Mark Zaid—and the politics of this were just too obvious.

Monarez’s constant refrain during the hearing that she was following The Science™ on vaccines and Kennedy wasn’t following The Science™, got hijacked by a series of questions from Florida Sen. Ashley Moody, a former prosecutor, state judge, and Attorney General for Florida.

“Do you want to introduce your lawyers that you brought today?” Sen. Moody asked Monarez. The former CDC Director smiled back, yet refused to name her own lawyers. The two ladies then jostled back and forth for over three minutes—three minutes!!!—with Sen. Moody pressing the former CDC Director to name her two lawyers, and Monarez smiling back with a crazed, cartoonish grin.

Words can’t do this exchange justice. Watch the video. Brutal.

That demented “I just got caught!” smile painted on Monarez’s face stirred other Senators like sharks who could smell the political blood in the water. Monarez was playing games and she wasn’t very good at it. Sen. Markwayne Mullin inquired how Monarez just happened to find Mark Zaid out of all the thousands of lawyers running around Washington.

Sen. Jim Banks then delved even further and discovered that Monarez “couldn’t recall” when or how she hired her attorney, Mark Zaid.

My guess is that Monarez is pretty much done. She got cooked during the hearing, so don’t expect any congressional Committee to invite her back to Washington, because she’s now tainted with politics.

None of the Senators brought up the leaked document exposing Sen. Cassidy as one of industry’s strategic voices and allies, because Senate comity won’t allow for such direct confrontation. I worked for several years in the Senate and can tell you what will happen instead. Senators and staff will whisper about Cassidy’s obvious coordination with industry in the Senate halls and joke that he is positioning himself for a lucrative lobbyist job when he leaves the body in 2026.

On a final note of coincidence, Sen. Cassidy called the hearing with fired CDC Director Susan Monarez the day before the first meeting of the CDC’s new Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The group was planning to look into possible vaccine side effects and changes to childhood vaccine schedule, and Sen. Cassidy made clear that he didn’t want the group to find any problems with vaccines. In fact, the entire hearing with fired CDC Director Monarez was called possibly, perhaps, conceivably ALMOST CERTAINTLY to pressure ACIP experts to not find any problems with vaccines.

Right after the hearing, Cassidy entered a press scrum. A reporter asked him that, if CDC’s vaccine panel changes child vaccine schedule, “should the American people have confidence in that decision”?

“No,” Cassidy responded.

Finally, thanks to everyone for making this newsletter possible and having such a huge impact in Washington. While over 36,000 subscribe, only a small portion are paying. If you can afford it, please become a paying member and keep my editor and I out of the poor house.

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Yes, Tylenol is Bad. Duh!

The Trump administration broke the internet last week with a press conference announcing that pregnant women should probably avoid using Tylenol (acetaminophen) as it has been linked to developmental disorders such as autism in children. I know that several physicians read this newsletter, and I’ll provide some interesting links to medical research below, but let’s first look at the reaction from liberal media.

COMPLETE. TOTAL. PANIC!!!!

I have said several times on social media, and it deserves repeating here: Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a serious mental health condition that should be treated in the privacy of a therapist’s office, not splashed about on social media. So let’s look at some pretty uncomfortable examples of TDS that help explain why so few trust legacy media anymore.

Here’s Reuters. Note the 2013 story reporting on possible dangers of pregnant mothers taking Tylenol followed by a report last week, stating that their own prior reporting on the possible dangers of pregnant women taking Tylenol is “not backed by science.”

CNN launched its “Fact First” ad campaign in 2017 to negate President Trump’s criticism that they were “fake news.” Since around this same time, CNN ran several stories discussing the possible links between Tylenol (acetaminophen) use by pregnant women and possible developmental disorders such as autism and ADHD in children.

Well, CNN reversed course last week.

I stacked up several of their headlines stretching back 2016. I also drew a blue line in the chronology when CNN reversed course last week after Trump’s press conference drawing attention to the link between Tylenol and autism.

I’m not sure if it’s even fair to do this, because it’s just so obvious that NPR is a public joke that spews anti-Trump nonsense, but yes. NPR also came out to deny its own prior reporting on Tylenol, once Trump linked the drug to autism.

Eric Deggans is NPR’s critic-at-large and the Knight Chair in Journalism and Media Ethics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, where he oversees teaching on ethics and journalism and organizes ethics conferences. Sounds impressive, no?

Deggans posted on X NPR’s story titled “Trump blames Tylenol for autism. Science doesn’t back him up.” Deggans also made some hoary argument that the company selling Tylenol might be able to “sue the government for wrongly depicting its product.”

Back in 2016, NPR ran a segment discussing the link between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and later behavioral problems in kids, based a study published in JAMA Pediatrics.

So yes. NPR is a clown show, and journalism professor Eric Deggan is helping run the circus.

But it wasn’t just American media who went nuts and forgot their own reporting just because Trump said something. The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) ran a slew of articles complaining that Trump made claims “without evidence” linking Tylenol to later problems with children, even running one story where a doctor called this a “manufactured conspiracy.”

But wait…..

Just a handful of years ago, the CBC reported that scientific studies found a “growing body of research suggests acetaminophen might alter fetal development.” That’s right. Here’s the CBC segment.

Of course, there’s more of this nuttiness. TDS is rampant in the media. But let’s move on to the science.

The White House released a statement citing several studies linking acetaminophen use in pregnant women, especially late in pregnancy, with long-term neurological effects in their children. The statement linked to a 2021 international consensus statement published in Nature Reviews Endocrinology and supported by over 90 researchers that called for “precautionary action” while recommending that pregnant women “minimize exposure” to acetaminophen “by using the lowest effective dose for the shortest possible time.”

The consensus statement’s lead author is Ann Bauer, a professor at University of Massachusetts. Bauer is also co-author with Andreas Baccarelli, who runs Harvard’s School of Public Health, on a recent review in the journal Environmental Health that further supports an association between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and increased incidence of neurodevelopmental problems in the fetus.

Here’s the review’s conclusions:

Nature attacked this review and any evidence linking acetaminophen use and autism in a news story published shortly after the Trump press conference. Quoting a spokesperson from Tylenol, Nature wrote, “We believe independent, sound science clearly shows that taking acetaminophen does not cause autism.”

“Here Nature examines the evidence for a link between the medication, which is used to treat fever as well as pain, and autism,” the journal’s science writers alleged in the news article.

But here’s the funny. Nature itself published the 2021 international consensus statement by Ann Bauer that was “supported by 91 scientists, clinicians and public health professionals from across the globe” and which summarized “evidence and call for precautionary action” on Tylenol.

I’m not joking. The consensus statement was published by Nature’s own sister journal “Nature Reviews Endocrinology.”

However, Trump critics have been citing a 2024 study published in JAMA, that examined siblings born in Sweden, to undermine the body of evidence finding acetaminophen use during pregnancy increases children’s risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya addressed the hype surrounding this study in a thread on X, pointing out the problems of sibling studies, which can introduce their own biases.

But for those interested in the best analysis of the evidence, professors Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson have spent decades as leaders in evidence-based medicine and offered their own assessment in their newsletter Trust the Evidence. Heneghan and Jefferson ripped into the review published by Bauer and Harvard’s Baccarelli in Environmental Health for failing to provide “strong evidence.” Again, this is the same review the White House cited in their statement.

However, Heneghan and Jefferson did find and discuss a handful of high-quality reviews that all pointed to an association between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and later neurodevelopmental disorders in children such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorder.

“All of these reviews (and there are more) suggest a connection,” they write.

On a final final note, several liberal pregnant women went on TikTok, downing Tylenol to laugh at Trump and “prove” Tylenol doesn’t cause autism. A nurse later claimed that a woman in her city actually overdosed while performing this stunt and died. The nurse then claimed that people began calling her employer to get her fired and ringing the number for an apartment where she used to live to harass the current occupants.

I can’t prove if the claims made by this nurse are true, but here’s a video of Dr. Michelle Vu, a pregnant physician in New York State, taking a Tylenol for no apparent reason except to laugh at Trump. Yes, it’s really bad out there.

TDS is a real thing.