Obama Slams Trump For ‘violence Against The Truth’ Over Tylenol Claims

LONDON — Barack Obama has accused President Donald Trump of “violence against the truth” for linking autism to the use of Tylenol by pregnant women.

The former president made a direct attack on his successor that was as rare for its forcefulness as for its setting — an arena stage on foreign soil in London on Wednesday — as he warned that the Trump administration’s claims undermine public health.

“We have the spectacle of my successor in the Oval Office, making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproved,” Obama said during an on-stage Q&A in front of a 14,000-strong crowd at London’s O2 Arena.

It was one of several stark moments during Obama’s appearance. The former president — who said last week that the U.S. was at an “inflection point” after the killing of Republican activist Charlie Kirk — noted that the U.K. and other nations are in a similarly precarious moment.

His comments on Tylenol came in response to Trump saying this week that pregnant women should avoid the medication, the brand name for acetaminophen, asserting that the fever-reducer was associated with a “very increased” risk of autism — a message contradicted by decades of data.

Obama rejected the claims and criticized Trump for increasing uncertainty for parents.

“The degree to which that undermines public health, the degree to which that can do harm to women who are pregnant, the degree to which that creates anxiety for parents who do have children who are autistic — which, by the way, itself is subject to a spectrum, and a lot of what is being trumpeted as these massive increases actually have to do with a broadening of the criteria across that spectrum so that people can actually get services and help,” Obama said. "All of that is violence against the truth.”

The former president directed some criticism at his political allies for not doing enough to avert the populist trend in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Much of the world reached a point in the late 20th century, Obama said, in which people realized “blood and soil nationalism doesn’t work,” and “dehumanising people who are different than us doesn’t work.”

But, speaking of political liberals and progressives, Obama said “we got complacent. We got smug.” Amid a backlash at inequality, globalization, migration and government bureaucracy, “sometimes right now it feels we may be backsliding towards that older way of thinking about the world.”

Obama argued there is an ascendant desire in the U.S. — backed by Trump, but also leaders such as Putin — to return to a world where “we the people is just some people, not all people — and where there are some pretty clear hierarchies in terms of status and who ranks where.”

The “creeping authoritarian tendencies” in such nations must be fought, he said.

Elsewhere, Obama — who was once known as the first social media president and joked “the first time I met Mark Zuckerberg I thought he was somebody’s kid” — said social media firms should show “restraint” after turning their algorithms to “spectacle, anger and grief” in the name of monetization.

There is a “significant risk” artificial intelligence will be “weaponized” by governments, non-state actors or “some guy in a basement creating a new strain of smallpox,” he said, or to “be used as a system of surveillance and oppression at levels we have not seen before.”

“Pandora’s box is opened,” he said — “we’re going to have to rearrange work and we’re going to have to rearrange the social safety net… and we’re not even having that conversation.”

London mayor Sadiq Khan — who Trump called “terrible” in a Tuesday address at the United Nations — was among those in attendance at the event.

Khan, the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital city, met Obama before his public Q&A and the two spoke privately, a person with knowledge of the encounter said.