Fact-checking Trump’s autism announcement – podcast | Science

During a television press conference on Monday, Donald Trump and the health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr made a series of unsuccessful claims on autism and its links with the use of paracetamol in pregnant women and on infant vaccinations. The comments were immediately refuted by scientists and health agencies around the world, but many have expressed their concern about the impact of the repetition of this disinformation at the highest levels of government. So what does science really say? Madeleine Finlay speaks to the editor -in -chief of sciences of the Guardian Ian Sample to verify the claims made in the announcement and discover what decades of scientific research on autism tells us about her causes and why the diagnoses are increasing