Barack Obama has come out swinging against Donald Trump’s health claims tying Tylenol to autism.
The 44th president also warned of America’s “creeping authoritarian tendencies” in fresh attacks on his successor during an event in London Wednesday.
“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 told the 14,000-strong crowd that had gathered to hear him speak, Politico reported.
Trump, 79, boldly asserted a link between acetaminophen—the active ingredient in Tylenol—and autism in newborn babies on Monday, instructing pregnant women to “tough it out” and avoid the painkilling drug altogether.
Major health organizations and national governments swiftly dismissed his claims, which are contradicted by a body of data. “Don’t pay any attention whatsoever to what Donald Trump says about medicine,” U.K. Health Secretary Wes Streeting advised Tuesday.
Obama, 64, said Trump’s announcement “undermines public health,” warning of the “harm” it could cause to pregnant women and the “anxiety” it could fuel for parents of autistic children.
“All of that is violence against the truth,” he declared.
The former president, who took the stage at London’s O2 Arena as part of a European speaking tour, said the U.S. was facing a growing desire “to go back to a very particular way of thinking about America, 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.”
“My successor has not been particularly shy about it,” he said, according to The Guardian, sticking to his usual practice of not naming Trump outright.
Obama has gradually taken a harder line against Trump in recent months, slamming his successor last week for inflaming political tensions after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
On Tuesday, he argued that much of the world had come to the consensus that “dehumanizing people who are different than us doesn’t work” in the late 20th century, but that progressives got “complacent” and “smug.”
“The challenge we face is not just to fight against these creeping authoritarian tendencies,” Obama said, “but it’s also to be reflective about, ‘how is it that we lost support for that earlier vision, that better story?’”
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