Why is Wes Streeting telling Donald Trump to shut up?

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0:48Acetaminophen. Is that okay? which is basically commonly known as Tylenol, during pregnancy can be associated with a very increased risk of autism. Pregnant women of the world may be saved by the mere fact that Donald Trump can't even pronounce the very drug he's trying to warn them off. He has made a claim without any evidence, and I say that again without any evidence, that he believes Tylenol, a paracetamol drug in the US, is linked to autism. It isn't. But how easy is it to laugh off the words of the president? Because just by saying it, isn't he going to affect the behaviour of millions of people on the basis of, well, next to nothing?

1:49Welcome to The News Agents.

1:54The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. It's Lewis.

1:58Lewis Goodall:Go on, say that again. It's John. Yes. It's John, mate. G'day. G'day. How you doing? I'm fine. So you're just going to go into Australian parry, are you? Yeah, exactly. Are you going to make jokes about where's my bush hat with the corks hanging down? Don't talk about your bush hat. Don't talk about anything like that. We got the Tim Tams. You don't need to hear those words from you. We got the macadamias. We did not get the kangaroo. No. Where's my wallaby? Well, next time, next time. Kangaroo steaks. Very good, actually. I've had one. Yeah. Yeah. So Tylenol in America, what we call paracetamol in the UK, is now on Donald Trump's hit list.

2:34And whilst there have been the odd study which says that, you know, a huge usage of paracetamol during pregnancy could cause problems, this doesn't seem to be based on any scientific fact whatsoever. Yet the leader of America, who has support of 35, 40 percent of the population who think he can do no wrong, is now pronouncing into a really dangerous territory on advice of what causes autism, on what babies should have in terms of jabs, which is going to cause chaos. And the health professionals in America are so alarmed at what he said. Not just in America. This is Wes Streeting, who was speaking on Lorraine this morning, having to rebuff literally the leader of the free world.

3:19There's been an awful lot of concern over remarks that Donald Trump made about the link between pregnant women taking paracetamol. And it's really, we've had so many calls from people, they're frightened, they're scared. Pregnant women are saying, what's going to happen? You know, they're worried. What's the NHS advice?

3:34Lewis Goodall:I've just got to be really clear about this. There is no evidence to link the use of paracetamol by pregnant women to autism in their children. None. In fact, a major study was done back in 2024 in Sweden involving 2.4 million children and it did not uphold those claims. so I would just say to people watching don't pay any attention whatsoever to what Donald Trump says about medicines in fact don't even take my word for it as a politician, listen to British doctors, British scientists the NHS I thought that was actually, just on the politics before we talk about the science, I thought that was extremely striking from streeting, it has been very rare since the Trump inauguration in January, it has been very very rare to hear a British government minister unequivocally say that Donald Trump is wrong about anything.

4:31Lewis Goodall:Now, you could say, well, this is the very least we could expect, given that scientifically speaking, he's clearly very, very wrong. But he made it very personal there. He said, you shouldn't listen to what Donald Trump has got to say about science. Very, very striking, considering how generally British government ministers under Keir Starmer have been very, very reluctant to criticise the president. And the fact he said, don't just take it from me, I think speaks to a wider question, which is Trump is clearly playing into something. And to put this in perspective, this theory was sort of pushed by his health secretary, RFK Jr., who has been toying around the edges of what creates autism, what has sort of fuelled autism in the US.

5:11is it that autism has grown exponentially or is it that the diagnosis of autism and what it actually constitutes has grown? And we have seen a series of policy changes from RFK in the last sort of few weeks around, for example, the MMR vaccine and whether that should be given to newborns. He said not around the hepatitis jab and whether that should be given to newborns. And he said not. And the Tylenol study is him trying to weave together tiny bits of sort of hearsay and studies that have been done over years that have not proved anything conclusively and handed it to the president who's now said it on the podium.

5:53And just to explain, there was a study done in Sweden, 2.4 million children, which categorically showed no link between Tylenol, paracetamol and autism. that was done literally just over a year ago. But I think the real problem with this story, and that's something that we're kind of discovering, is even the coverage of it is problematic. Because as soon as you start putting those words together, you know, in a headline, in an article, on a podcast, Tylenol, autism, all the rest of it, you will worry people, as Lorraine said. Pregnant women are incredibly vulnerable already because they feel like they carry so much responsibility, so much kind of pre-birth guilt on what is happening to their child in the womb, that anything that suggests they might be about to do something wrong makes you panic.

6:45And, you know, I've done it myself. When my kids were born, I had my babies. It was just in the wake of the Andrew Wakefield MMR. Absolute scandal. He was the first person to say. He was the first person. And I got terrified about giving the kids the jug. Is it OK? Is it all right? You know, I read the news, I read evidence, I look at data and I was still in that position where I was suddenly unsure of the ground beneath my feet because it's like a worm in your brain. It starts to implant something that starts to make you feel guilty. I think the thing that is so hard to compute is that if you look over history of public health, I mean, the vaccine programme, the vaccine against polio.

7:24And my mother died a few years ago. She'd had polio. She suffered with it her whole life. It's bloody awful. The idea that this vaccine came along, which prevented polio spreading. It was fantastic. The MMR vaccine has seen a massive reduction in measles and mumps and all those other debilitating diseases, which can kill in children, has been an amazing thing. Which is killing in Texas, in children. Exactly. So the idea that you find one little report that says there may be a problem with it and you cling to that rather than the body of evidence is something that i find so interesting about the pathology of america in conspiracy theory land where you distrust what any expert says and if you've got 500 people saying 500 leading medical professionals saying this is okay and you get one saying oh it could be bloody dangerous you believe the person who's saying

8:18Lewis Goodall:it's bloody dangerous it's mad i think it's very interesting that trump has been um so interested in this subject for so long. So Trump, I mean, obviously, who often sort of flips in the wind about all sorts of things and has lots of passing fancies. I mean, I actually wasn't aware until reading about it this morning that Trump's interest in autism goes back to at least 2007. You know, he was hosting leaders of kind of advocacy groups who were themselves, even at that time, sceptical about the interplay between vaccines or the suggestion that there's an interplay between vaccines and autism. Down in Mar-a-Lago in 2007, you know, this is something that he has sort of been consistently interested in and obsessed about.

8:56Lewis Goodall:And indeed now, of course, he is flanked. And the fact he was doing this from the Roosevelt Room in the White House, flanked by RFK, his health secretary, who himself, of course, is perhaps the most famous vaccine sceptic slash vaccine conspiracy theorist in the world, is extremely telling because this thing that was once niche, this scepticism about vaccines, this sort of that was confined to kind of the fringes of politics, has obviously become deeply mainstreamed within the right of American politics, but also in our own country as well. I mean, RFK, before he was confirmed by the Senate, told everyone what he was going to do and what he believed.

9:37We knew about his vaccine scepticism. We knew about the rabbit holes of his health conspiracies. The whole movement is called Make America Healthy Again, which so far seems to have basically led to a measles outbreak, as I said, in Texas, and to moves that will now make it infinitely harder for health professionals to give newborn babies jabs that can save them from very serious diseases. And yet he was still confirmed in the job. It's kind of on a lot of people's shoulders, this. You know, there was no moment at which he said, oh, well, actually, there was a moment where he said, I still believe in vaccines, I think.

10:17But he broadly brought to the table the whole of MAGA conspiracy into that role. And everyone was like, well, we've got to give him a chance.

10:27Lewis Goodall:But then there's that irony, isn't it, that it was Trump more than anybody else. If you if you had to point to a singular kind of policy achievement, the first Trump administration, it was Operation Warp Speed. It was Operation Warp Speed, which was the programme which developed and unveiled at speed the vaccine. So as ever with the COVID vaccine, so as ever with Trump, there is that contradiction and paradox that he both kind of surfs in these waters. But also he himself, arguably, is most responsible for the very thing that so many. He had Fauci. I mean, he had Anthony Fauci, who he obviously then turned into enemy number one.

10:58Lewis Goodall:But he wanted it at that time because that's what he saw as the key to reopening and putting COVID to bed, which it was. But he was also doing things like kind of advancing the drug hydroxychloroquine, which is an anti-malarial, anti-rheumatic drug for treating Covid. And people started taking hydroxychloroquine with the consequence that they were suddenly having a heart arrhythmia. And there were all sorts of other side effects from it. It was never a drug that was meant for curing Covid or dealing with Covid. I think this is the moment that we have to remind our listeners and our viewers of bleach.

11:27So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn't been checked, but you're going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you're going to test that, too. Sounds interesting. Right, and then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.

12:11So it'd be interesting to check that. So that you're going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds interesting to me. Yeah, a bit of swallowing the old bleach there. Swallowing on a bit of bleach. Yeah, I was in the room for that briefing. There were only 12 reporters there because there was Covid restrictions on the numbers. And I had arranged to go backstage into the White House afterwards to speak to the press secretary about something. And I pulled the door that leads into lower press in the White House. And there was this council of war going on because clearly they had recognised what an utter fuck up it was of what Trump had just said.

12:42and that night I went back to my home and got an email from the press secretary of the biggest bleach manufacturer in America a company that makes Clorox saying essentially whatever you do do not listen to the president of the United States of America when he's advising you to take bleach inside your body and you know I can imagine that if you're the comms director for a bleach company you're normally writing press releases about the new peach scented bleach that we're bringing out for this spring and instead of which you had this guy having to write a press release saying please don't swallow please don't listen to the president please don't swallow any bleach don't swallow anything that we make or that he says yeah exactly completely i do think though

13:23Lewis Goodall:with this there is i think there was a lesson for those of us and the side of politics and the media who want to kind of report responsibly and want to and believe in expertise which is this which is i think one of the problems with having people like trump and then the kind of like mainstreaming of kind of conspiracy laden discourse about science and vaccines. And so one of the problems is, is that quite naturally we in the media who do not believe that and believe in, you know, trying to get the correct facts and evidence out there. Naturally, then sort of the natural reaction is to then sort of almost swing in unequivocally behind the idea that science is sort of complete.

13:58Lewis Goodall:And there's one scientific explanation. And the danger with that is, is that it does tend to ignore concerns that people can have that. and I'm not saying this is true in this case, but it has been true in the past, that science can be wrong and that there are plenty and plenty of examples in the past of where doctors or medical experts or whatever have said things which later turned out to be true. You know, we covered one earlier in the year on this show about sodium valparate. Sodium valparate, which was a drug which was prescribed to women who had epilepsy and were consistently told there was no danger to your baby, et cetera, et cetera.

14:30Lewis Goodall:And it turned out, actually, there was a profound danger both to the woman and to the baby themselves. I think the danger can be that when those things then do happen, it allows those who are sceptical or the conspiracy theorists to say, ah, you see, it is part of this sort of big conspiracy. So I do think that both politicians and the media have to find a kind of language which is sympathetic to those who are not down the rabbit hole but can have concerns and at the same time basically recognise expertise where it exists. I think that is a challenge. I disagree. And I'll tell you why I disagree, because I think what we saw, for example, recently was when Trump bought federal troops on the streets of Washington and is now spreading further afield.

15:09The Democrats were caught in the headlights. I mean, I remember that piece we talk about Maureen Dowd, who said, oh, well, you know, the Democrats do have to recognize there's a lot of crime and don't play down crime because otherwise, you know, we just feed into people's worries that we don't understand it. it's a very very different thing if scientists are talking about a link between autism and Tylenol if there are credible voices talking about a link between autism and Tylenol

15:36Lewis Goodall:then I think we take it off and I'm not saying it's credible but there are some scientists who would say that there is a precautionary principle involved and it's best used a precautionary principle I mean I'm just saying that I think that's dangerous I think the trouble is and I've been looking at the New York Times reporting now which is like oh well there was this study and this study and this study and this study, but they didn't make up to that study. Like if I was a pregnant woman and I was suddenly seeing everyone talking about this and enlarging it and amplifying it, and I keep on seeing the word Tylenol everywhere and I keep on seeing autism, that's going to freak me out.

16:07I mean, that line from Trump, right? And just to put this in context, if you have a fever as a pregnant woman and you don't take pain killers, you don't try and abate the fever, you are probably doing much, much more harm to your unborn baby than if you leave it. And his advice was to tough it out. I mean, I don't know what kind of macho shtick he's playing, but I just think it's very confusing. I think you have to be really categoric when something like this happens and say, this is not true, there is no evidence to support it. Fine, go off and do your scientific investigation. Talk about autism, talk about the rise, talk about things that are behind it, but be really, really clear when it comes to something like this that you are not trying to lead people off to go and investigate.

16:52Isn't the problem that you get today is that you've either got to talk in purely black or purely white. And there are times when you do need nuance. Of course, there are going to be side effects with drugs. All sorts of every drug that exists that's on the market will have some side effects for certain types of people. But that's not a side effect. I mean, you cannot say that autism, you know, that a drug that leads to autism is a side effect. That would be that would be enough to take it off the market forever. But going back to, you know, the kind of introduction of the Covid vaccine, it was the record fast time in which the vaccine was produced.

17:27It was legitimate that there were some concerns among people. I wanted to get the vaccine as soon as I bloody could. I wanted to protect myself from, you know, getting Covid because of, you know, the various risk factors, etc, etc, etc. And so I was very, very keen. You know, I I believed in it. But when you start to question and people say you're being ludicrous and you're being a conspiracy theorist, I don't think that wins anyone over. I think that you've got to somehow kind of have a language which says, look, for the overwhelming majority, it's going to be absolutely safe. And for the small number of side effects, my God, not having a vaccine would be far worse.

18:03I don't think anyone's not saying that, though, are they? I mean, even West Streeting was very cautious. He says there is no evidence linking it. And I think that's the form of language you use. Of course, we know some people are going to have an adverse reaction to Tylenol, just like some people had an adverse reaction to Covid. Of course, we understand that, you know, even something that is 99 percent great, one percent of a whole population is a hell of a lot.

18:27Lewis Goodall:But I think in the Covid period in particular, because there was such understandable willingness and an understandable desire from governments to get as many people vaccinated as possible. I think the language which was used at the time, which was basically so absolutist, did open up a space for the conspiracy theories of the world. I think it would have actually been better to be more straightforward at the time. And for politicians, not so much the scientists, but the politicians as well, to sort of hold people's hand a little bit more. Because, look, I think people who honestly have got some problem, and as there are among the MAGA crowd in particular, vaccines which have been around for, in some cases, centuries, whether it's the polio vaccines you were saying, John, or whatever it happens to be.

19:06Lewis Goodall:That is one thing. You know, that is clearly crazy. There has been so much evidence literally across population after population across literally decades. It is nonsense. But with newer vaccines, I mean, the COVID vaccine was brought forward in record time. And I'm not surprised that there were people who were a little bit sceptical about it. And I think that it should have been OK within the public discourse to express that. And I think one of the other problems is a bit like the autism stuff. As always, Trump slightly alights upon some kernel of truth, right? which is that it is true to say that autism diagnoses have been going up.

19:38Lewis Goodall:One in 31 American eight-year-olds have an autism diagnosis today, according to the CDC. In 2007, the number was 150. I think right-thinking forces in the media and in politics should be okay to talk about that, to talk about the multifactorial reasons why that might be, because not doing so basically allows people like Trump to come along with nonsense conspiracy. I don't think anyone's not doing it. I mean, that's the point about this. Nobody is saying, oh, don't be silly. there's no problem with autism or there's, you know, you're kind of exaggerating. I mean, obviously, as I said at the beginning, we don't know whether that is a wider diagnosis or a wider understanding of autism or if it's a greater number of cases.

20:16That's still unknown. But I think the idea that, you know, scientists haven't been looking at this, that they haven't been running studies, that they haven't been trying out drugs, that they haven't been. I mean, obviously, you don't try out medical tests on pregnant women. But the idea that this hasn't been going on makes it sound like, you know, scientists are going down this blind alley of thinking everything's fine all the time. It's not. But when the leader of America stands up and makes that link, I think you have to be really clear that you're not kind of getting pulled down into his place.

20:47Because honestly, if you go online now and you just see Tylenol, autism, Tylenol, I guarantee you, I guarantee you there will be women who decide today that they will not take painkillers for their entire pregnancy. And God knows what kind of a pregnancy they or their child will have. Look, it was the height of irresponsibility to frame it and phrase it in the way that he did in a White House briefing that span out of control, predictably, and him saying stuff that was way beyond probably what had been agreed before they went into the room. He just said to pregnant women, Tylenol, do not take it.

21:21Now, there is no medical research which says do not take it. None at all. And yet the power of the presidency is that a huge number of people are going to be affected by all of that. And it is so classic Donald Trump, isn't it? That on so many things where there is just maybe a kernel of truth, a small snippet of something there. and he alights on it and thinks this is I've discovered something new and the power of the presidency being put to ill use which I think I mean if you're an American now you know what's going to happen to Tylenol sales will that be a good thing or a bad thing it will be a bad thing

21:59Lewis Goodall:it's also part of his overall shtick isn't it right I thought one of the most revealing parts of his conference yesterday was when he sort of started talking about Tylenol and then said I'm going to say it look I'm going to say it as if someone had been stopping him saying it or as if it was a kind of this great truth and that is central to trump's politics right the the and that's actually where he's really come unstuck with the sort of the epstein files and everything like that his whole he works best or his politics works best when he tries to portray himself as some sort of conduit from the public sticking it to the establishment the scientific establishment whatever it happens to be revealing some hidden truth that they've hidden from you and that was at least part of what yesterday was about and i think the global nature of it i mean i think the Lorraine clip shows that really clearly, that it's not Trump speaking to the American public.

22:45You can't contain that in a border. You can't contain that to America. As soon as he says that, we're all going, oh, what's the Tylenol equivalent? Oh, is that paracetamol? Is that the same drug? Is that the one? Have we got that? What would we be said? It's going on everywhere now. It's going on throughout the world now. People are now looking at whether they should not be taking painkillers in pregnancy. Look, I remember debates when I was in Washington about what should be put on the news where Donald Trump has again claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from him. And I would always ring up the news desk in London and say, you can't write it like that.

23:18You've got to say he didn't and with no evidence, make it clear. But as soon as you've got the claim, even with and with no evidence over the 2020 election. Yeah, it led to the ghastliness of January the 6th and the social disruption that that caused. And it was terrible in and of itself. But this is of a far more serious nature where you are playing with millions of people's health by saying something that has no factual basis for it. And that is genuinely playing with people's lives. I think it is all part of the same thing. I mean, you know, on the one hand, this is about direct consequences to people's health.