The CEO of the company that makes Tylenol met privately with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ask him not to link the drug to autism.
Kirk Perry, chief executive of Kenvue, met with Kennedy over the active ingredient, acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol, which is essential in the efficacy of the pain-relieving pill, according to a Friday Wall Street Journal report.
The Kennedy-helmed agency plans to release the report within the month, according to an article last week from the Journal. As of Friday, the company saw more than $2.2 billion erased from its market cap following the news, according to data on Google Finance.
Perry serves as the New Jersey company’s interim CEO, which was spun off from Johnson & Johnson in 2023. Perry, along with Chief Scientific Officer Caroline Tillett, made the case for the drug’s safety.
Executives highlighted that there are not many other drugs that are safe for pregnant women to take when having a fever, according to the Journal‘s report.
An HHS spokesman told the Daily Beast that claims about this particular meeting are speculative.
“We are using gold-standard science to get to the bottom of America’s unprecedented rise in autism rates. HHS officials regularly meet with stakeholders to get their perspective about our agenda to Make America Healthy Again,” Andrew Nixon, HHS’ Director of Communications, said in a statement. “Any claims regarding this or any other specific meeting, however, are nothing more than speculation unless officially discussed by HHS.”
A spokeswoman for Kenvue told the Daily Beast the consumer health firm did have a “scientific exchange” with Kennedy and his staff.
“As we would with any regulator who reaches out to us, we engaged in a scientific exchange with the Secretary and members of his staff as it relates to the safety of our products,” the spokeswoman said in a statement. “We are concerned about the potential for consumer confusion and misinformation about the safety of taking acetaminophen during pregnancy, particularly as cough, cold and flu season approaches.”
The link between the developmental disorder and Tylenol use is somewhat mixed. Researchers analyzed the results of six studies looking at the link between the pain medication and childhood autism and published their conclusions in August in the journal Environmental Health. It found “strong evidence” to support the case that acetaminophen taken by pregnant women ups the risk for autism in children.
But an earlier study published in 2024 in the Journal of the American Medical Association didn’t find an association when looking at data from nearly 2.5 million children in Sweden.
Tylenol has faced a number of setbacks over the years, including the Chicago Tylenol murders in 1982, in which an unknown individual put cyanide in bottles, resulting in the deaths of seven people. In 2009, there were a number of recalls of the pain pills due to defective manufacturing.
If the Kennedy report does cite the drug as a link to autism, the firm will fight back hard against the claim, according to the Journal‘s report.
Kenvue has faced a series of challenges since the company went public in 2023, with shares trading around 15 percent.
In July, the firm ousted the former CEO Thibaut Mongon and launched a review of the company.
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