TylenoTORT: The Litigation Industry's Role in US Health Policy
Linking Acetaminophen to Autism Was Never About the Science
On Monday, September 22, 2025, President Trump led a press conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House following a press release on the causes of autism with Robert F Kennedy Jr and other directors from his Department of Health and Human Services. The main takeaway from this event was their allegation that women taking the painkiller acetaminophen (known commonly by the leading brand, Tylenol) during pregnancy contributed to the rise in autism in children. They also promoted an herbal supplement, leucovorin, to treat people on the spectrum and launched funding for further exposomic research into autism.
Scientists have been baffled by this association of autism with prenatal use of Tylenol, have been spending the last week showing the weakness of the publications the President and RFK Jr had relied on, and the broad consensus that acetaminophen has been proven to be (one of the few painkillers) safe for pregnant women. Science communicators and medical associations have tried to explain to confused expectant mothers that the product is safe for their babies. The scientific establishments are strongly disagreeing with the correlation put forward by the White House.
Scientists are right to be thoroughly confused. The assertions at this press event were not about scientific facts. It was about greed, grift and opportunism.
Making Lawyers Wealthy Again
By last Thursday, the Washington Post published a story that those in the pharmaceutical, chemical and pesticide industries knew first-hand – that this entire show was just another snatch and grab opportunism by law firms acting from the Predatort Playbook. It was not about medical advice for pregnant women, dealing with causes of chronic illness or finding an explanation for the perceived increase in autism diagnoses. It was about the litigation industry keeping their private jets gassed up.
But while the Washington Post pointed to the patently obvious, they only scratched the surface on the corruption behind Monday’s manipulative press conference. The article covered some of the basic facts:
In 2024, hundreds of lawsuits filed against Kenvue (the former J&J consumer products division and maker of Tylenol) claiming a link between prenatal acetaminophen use and autism were thrown out.
The judge, Denise Cote, rejectedthe cases on the basis of poor scientific evidence of any causal link, accusing the plaintiffs’ litigation consultant, Andrea Baccarelli, of cherry-picking weak studies and ignoring stronger research that showed no link between Tylenol and autism. The judge claimed that Baccarelli’s “failure to engage seriously with the complexity of the relevant studies’ outcomes is well illustrated.”
Andrea Baccarelli was compensated $700 an hour and to date, has been paid $150,000 for his work for the litigation industry in attempting to establish a causal link between Tylenol and autism.
Baccarelli published a literature review paper last August that once again reiterated his views suggesting a correlation between Tylenol and autism. The Washington Post article noted that the paper could not determine a causal link. This paper has been cited many times in the weeks leading up to the White House event and during the press conference itself.
RFK Jr’s law firm, Wisner Baum, has been advertising for potential plaintiffs who took Tylenol during pregnancy. While RFK Jr claims he is no longer receiving fees from Wisner Baum since assuming his cabinet post, his son Conor has taken his place and assumed his financial stake in the litigation business. Mysteriously, the Washington Post article notes that Wisner Baum took down the webpage trolling for autism plaintiffs in May of this year.
But there is a lot more to this story than what the Washington Post revealed.
Digging Deeper into the Fraud
I went to my main trusted source on litigation industry abuse of science and scientists, Nathan Schachtman, whose article raised several concerns about the recently published Baccarelli study. Over the last month, prior to the White House “Don’t use Tylenol” event, this study was being amplified throughout the media.
Schachtman found Baccarelli’s conflict of interest disclosure referring to his central involvement in the Kenvue Tylenol lawsuits to be “anemic”.
Schachtman goes into detail on how the literature review cherry-picked certain weak studies, used a flawed “transdiagnostic” methodology and failed miserably to prove an association between acetaminophen and autism. In a coming article, I will examine how these acetaminophen-autism papers do not meet the White House’s self-proclaimed Gold Standard of Science.
But at least Baccarelli declared his interests … while other authors did not. Schachtman shows how another author of this paper, Beate Ritz, has a long history of being funded for her litigation consulting.
“Ritz has testified, for claimants, in cases involving claims of heavy metals in baby food, in cases involving claims that paraquat exposure caused Parkinson’s disease, and most notoriously for plaintiffs in glyphosate litigation, where her witnessing is often done for the Wisner Baum law firm that employs the son of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.”
Schachtman notes that Ritz is a fellow in the Collegium Ramazzini, making “her a full-fledged member of the Lobby and a supporter of the lawsuit industry”. More on that in the next section.
The authors of this Baccarelli paper, instrumental in the White House advanced media blitz, had a background in environmental sciences and health equity. Schachtman rightly questions how their backgrounds and their Navigation Guide methodology could be beneficial for “pharmaco-epidemiologic or teratologic controversies”. The authors claim the paper was NIH-funded (implying they had requested funding for research to establish a link between acetaminophen and autism). This is not the case and Schachtman details how the actual funding came from several NIEHS grants for other studies on environmental exposures. Not Tylenol and not autism.
Why the subterfuge? Perhaps it would be better to ask how much funding for this study came from the litigation industry.
Litigation Industry Grifters
As there were many open questions here to the fraudulent activities behind this Tylenol takedown and the role of the litigation industry, I decided to take a closer look. As a frequent analyst of techniques behind the La Jolla Predatort Playbook, it only took a few Google searches (what people used to use before relying on AI for their knowledge) to realize how the US tort lawyers were orchestrating this entire gameplan. Allow me to add a few more points to accentuate the stench wafting out of the White House on behalf of litigation industry greed and grift.
The Collegium Ramazzini is not only a private club for activist scientists, they have directed their research endeavors to advancing their concept of adversarial regulation. A strategy established by several of its leading fellows, they no longer rely on facts leading to policy decisions, but rather they prepare scientific evidence for the US litigation industry to sue companies out of business or out of using certain products or methods.
Not only is Beate Ritz “a full-fledged member of the Lobby and a supporter of the lawsuit industry”, she likely used her secret handshake connections to get the poorly-produced Baccarelli literature review published in the Environmental Health journal. This journal was founded and maintains editorial control via Collegium Ramazzini fellows who would easily look the other way in publishing a Predatort-produced paper.
It is becoming a common tactic for the US tort law firms to fund scientists to prepare evidence that then becomes research to be published in academic journals (and then recycled as “emerging evidence” for future lawsuits). Litigation industry darling, and Ramazzini fellow, Christopher Portier, has written the textbook on this lawsuit research hack (using Ramazzini’s Environmental Health journal while earning millions as a glyphosate litigation consultant). The Baccarelli literature review appears to fall under this same tactic.
It should be added that the lead author for the Baccarelli literature review is Didier Prada but Beate Ritz acknowledged in the Washington Post article that she was approached by Baccarelli to lend her name to the publication. The peer review discussion only involved replies by Baccarelli, a clear indicator that the other authors were serving merely as “PubMed placemats”.
There is little doubt this paper was engineered by the litigation industry, employing their key scientific consultant to amplify the association. Getting the lawyers to then have RFK Jr’s ear was the easy part.
Litigation Finance and Special Interests
There is a lot of money riding on making the Tylenol association with autism stick in the eyes of potential jurors. When the first bellwether lawsuits were thrown out last year because of Baccarelli’s poor research methodology and cherry-picking, appeals were filed. They needed stronger evidence and an elevated level of public fear and outrage. Last Monday, the White House delivered that.
Why didn’t the law firms just accept the weakness of the science, lick their wounds and chase some other ambulances?
One thing very few understand is how the litigation industry is driven by the special interests behind the litigation finance industry. Litigation finance is the dark, shadowy funding instrument for the tort law firms. Not only do most lawyers rely on loans from these non-transparent alternative financial institutions (often at loan shark rates and settlement payouts), but their investors often earmark their lending to focus on certain caseloads.
Ashley Keller was the co-lead of the failed acetaminophen MDLs in New York’s Southern District. Keller did not start his career as a tort lawyer though, but rather, made his name in the early days of the litigation finance industry, co-founding Gerchen Keller Capital. Keller had “$1.3 billion in assets under management and was the world’s largest private investment manager focused on legal and regulatory risk prior to being acquired by Burford Capital in 2016”. Keller certainly knows how special interest groups fund the litigation shows, the depth of the Tylenol lawsuit investors’ networks and who ultimately must pay the piper. The next wave of Tylenol lawsuits have been effectively weaponized.
Who are these investors pushing millions via litigation finance firms to bankroll the upcoming Tylenol MDLs (expect more than 100,000 cases if the glyphosate playbook is anything to go by)? As the special interests hide behind the feeble claims of attorney-client privilege, there is no disclosure of the sources of litigation finance funding (or how much of any settlements go to pay them off).
It could be MAHA herbal supplement companies (like the one distributing leucovorin that Dr Oz had had up to a $25 million interest in).
It could be vaccine makers happy to deflect the autism claims.
It could be another instance of Emirati litigation finance investors poisoning the American judicial system.
The point is that no one in the present White House cares as so many are beholden to the litigation industry and their special interests.
Perhaps it is a combination of his age, fatigue and intellect, but Donald Trump tends to repeat the last thing someone tells him. I suspect in the antechamber prior to the press conference, the four HHS directors repeatedly told him to link Tylenol to autism by stressing that pregnant women should not use the painkiller. He repeated that warning and linkage more than 20 times during the press conference. How much of this was planted by litigation opportunism?
Kenvue, already drowning in talcum powder lawsuits, will likely not survive the coming onslaught from the litigation industry on Tylenol and autism. The maker of so many iconic US consumer brands, from Band-Aid to Listerine, will join a long history of companies brought to their knees, not by bad science or liable products, but by a relentless Predatort Playbook that will stop at nothing to profit from public fear and animosity. But this is the first time that a company’s downfall will be directly at the hands of US government administrators.
As these grifters have no satiation point, it will be an interesting three more years.