TYLENOL’S REDEMPTION
Fish your Tylenol out of the trash! R.F.K. Jr. admitted this week that he does not have “sufficient” evidence to prove the household pain reliever causes autism. The health secretary’s reversal leaves Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in an awkward place, given he’s just launched a lawsuit accusing Johnson & Johnson, the drug’s manufacturer, of deceptive practices in marketing itself as the only safe pain reliever for pregnant women. Indeed, just earlier this month, R.F.K. Jr. was calling pregnant women who elected to take the drug “irresponsible.” Coincidentally, “irresponsible” is exactly the word we’d use to describe the health secretary’s reckless fearmongering, which, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, presents a much more real threat to pregnant women than an imagined tie to autism.
GONE WITH THE WIND
First it was Tylenol, then it was beets. Now R.F.K. Jr. is targeting wind farms. This week, he directed the C.D.C. to study their alleged harms. While we suspect he gets the ideas for most of his crusades by closing his eyes and pulling a random noun from a hat labeled “Witch Trials,” this one seems to come straight from the horse’s mouth—“They’re a joke! They don’t work,” Trump declared of wind turbines at the United Nations General Assembly in September. Trump’s vendetta against wind energy dates back to 2012, when he tried to block construction of 11 turbines near his Aberdeenshire golf course because he considered them an eyesore. “Those big windmills”—he calls them “windmills,” like the medieval contraptions used to grind grain and pump water—“are so pathetic and so bad and so expensive to operate.… And most of them are built in China!” Experts, meanwhile, remind us that wind turbines provide clean, renewable power—and remain the most cost-effective source of energy on the planet.
