The CEO of the company that makes Tylenol has directly pleaded with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. not to link the drug to autism.
Kirk Perry, chief executive of Kenvue, and the company’s chief scientific officer, Caroline Tillett, met with Kennedy amid a mounting belief that his department of Health and Human Services will claim pregnant women put their babies at higher risk of autism by taking the drug, the Wall Street Journal reported.
He warned Kennedy—a committed anti-vaxxer—about “misinformation” and “confusion.”
The Kennedy-helmed agency plans to release the report within four weeks, the Journal reported last week. It will name the active ingredient, acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol, as a risk factor for autism—a conclusion for which there is not a scientific consensus.
Perry’s company has seen more than $2.2 billion wiped off its value since the revelation that Kennedy, a notorious anti-vaxxer with no medical qualifications, plans to make the claim about Tylenol. Kenvue was spun out of Johnson & Johnson in 2023.
At the meeting with Kennedy, Perry and Tillett warned that few other drugs are safe for pregnant women to take for fever, the Journal reported.
An HHS spokesman did not deny that Kennedy was lobbied by the Tylenol executives, but told the Daily Beast that the report was “speculation.” Kenvue confirmed the account.
“We are using gold-standard science to get to the bottom of America’s unprecedented rise in autism rates. HHS officials regularly meet with stakeholders to get their perspective about our agenda to Make America Healthy Again,” Andrew Nixon, HHS’ Director of Communications, said in a statement. “Any claims regarding this or any other specific meeting, however, are nothing more than speculation unless officially discussed by HHS.”
A spokeswoman for Kenvue told the Daily Beast the consumer health firm did have a “scientific exchange” with Kennedy and his staff.
“As we would with any regulator who reaches out to us, we engaged in a scientific exchange with the Secretary and members of his staff as it relates to the safety of our products,” the spokeswoman said in a statement. “We are concerned about the potential for consumer confusion and misinformation about the safety of taking acetaminophen during pregnancy, particularly as cough, cold and flu season approaches.”
Scientific study of the link between the developmental disorder and Tylenol use has been sparse and inconclusive. Researchers analyzed the results of six studies looking at the link between the pain medication and childhood autism and published their conclusions in August in the journal Environmental Health. It found “strong evidence” to support the case that acetaminophen taken by pregnant women ups the risk for autism in children. But that report was criticized for not taking other factors into account in its statistical study.
An earlier study published in 2024 in the Journal of the American Medical Association did not find an association between Tylenol and autism when looking at data from nearly 2.5 million children in Sweden.
Tylenol has faced a number of setbacks over the years, including the Chicago Tylenol murders in 1982, in which an unknown individual put cyanide in bottles, resulting in the deaths of seven people. In 2009, there were a number of recalls of the pain pills due to defective manufacturing.
If the Kennedy report does cite the drug as a link to autism, the firm will fight back hard against the claim, according to the Journal‘s report.
Kenvue has faced a series of challenges since the company went public in 2023, with shares trading around 15 percent.
In July, the firm ousted the former CEO Thibaut Mongon and launched a review of the company.
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