‘Don’t trust Trump’: how UK health experts are fighting back against a war on medicine | Health

Wes Streeting, the UK health secretary, was in a government car heading back into central London from a flag-raising to mark the UK’s recognition of Palestine when he saw the news. “He was aghast,” an aide said. Streeting was reading on his phone that Donald Trump had just warned women not to take Tylenol – known outside the US as paracetamol – during pregnancy.

The US president had alleged without evidence that the common painkiller caused autism in children. “Don’t take Tylenol,” Trump said about a drug also known as acetaminophen.

The British government has been criticised for tiptoeing around Trump on all manner of issues. But not, it seems, on this. Streeting decided to devise a plan to limit the fallout in the UK and reassure mothers-to-be that taking paracetamol was safe. He decided to rebut – publicly and vigorously – what Trump had said.

Already booked to appear on a breakfast show the next morning, Streeting knew he would be asked about Trump. “He knew he had to be unequivocal,” the aide said. “That whatever diplomatic issues we face, first and foremost our responsibility is people’s health.”

‘Listen to doctors, scientists’

When the question came, Streeting was brutal. “I trust doctors over President Trump, frankly, on this,” he said. “I’ve just got to be really clear about this: there is no evidence to link the use of paracetamol by pregnant women to autism in their children. None.

“So I would just say to people watching: don’t pay any attention whatsoever to what Donald Trump says about medicine. In fact, don’t even take my word for it, as a politician – listen to British doctors, British scientists, the NHS.”

His headline-making response to Trump’s baseless claim was complemented by a “flood the airwaves” strategy that he and his Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) had begun putting in place the day before.

Senior figures from bodies such as the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, which regulates medicines, NHS England, the Royal College of GPs, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the UK Health Security Agency conveyed similar messages to Streeting’s in media interviews throughout Tuesday.

The National Autistic Society criticised “the incessant misinformation about autism from President Trump and [the US health secretary] Robert F Kennedy Jr”, which it said would undermine decades of research and leave autistic people “dismayed and frightened”.

Their responses aligned with those issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) and leading medical bodies in the US.

In addition, DHSC officials gave doctors and influencers with large followings on social media factsheets and briefings on paracetamol and pregnancy to help ensure they got accurate, well-evidenced information out on platforms such as X, TikTok and Instagram.

Recent months have brought several high-profile examples of untruths about medicine and such misinformation is causing growing alarm in the global health community.

In June, cancer doctors revealed their horror that some patients were shunning established treatments for the disease and instead opting for untested quack regimes such as coffee enemas and raw juice diets.

Days later, the BBC disclosed how Paloma Shemirani, the daughter of a nurse turned anti-vaxxer, Kate Shemirani, had died after rejecting chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The 23-year-old had chosen to use Gerson therapy, an unproven treatment for cancer, instead.

And this month in an appearance on the main stage at Reform UK’s conference, the cardiologist claimed that King Charles and the Princess of Wales’s cancer diagnoses were linked to them having had the Covid vaccine.

But experts who study health misinformation see Trump’s remarks as a worrying new low.

Helen Bedford, a professor of child health at University College London (UCL), said: “I was horrified, because it’s not evidence-based and he is the most powerful man in the world. It was shocking because you know the impact it’s going to have, not just on pregnant women but also because it implies that autism is something to be avoided. It was a horrifying announcement, damaging and dangerous.”

Dr Susanna Kola-Palmer, a psychologist at the University of Huddersfield, said: “People are prone to authority bias, trusting and believing what someone in authority says just because they are an authority figure, not necessarily because they are right. Donald Trump, as the US president, is a powerful public figure and therefore lots of people will accept what he says without questioning it.

“When health misinformation is being peddled so publicly by such a powerful person, it is both deeply troubling and dangerous, as it risks eroding public trust in science and compromising public health.”

Health experts fear Trump linking acetaminophen to autism could dissuade pregnant women – who already have few medicines available if they fall sick – from using it and in turn lead to illnesses such as pain or a fever going untreated and harming them or their unborn child.

Pharmacists in the UK report that Trump’s remarks may already be influencing some people’s decisions about their health. In a survey of 500 pharmacies, 24% said they had encountered patients this week who were questioning paracetamol’s safety.

“These are alarming findings which show that comments made in the US are having a direct impact on patients in the UK and potentially deterring some from taking what are proven and safe medical treatments,” said Olivier Picard, the chair of the National Pharmacy Association.

‘Fringe narratives’

Writing in the Lancet medical journal in July, Heidi Larson, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, identified the US as the origin of so much of the “pandemic of misinformation” and “fringe narratives” that caused controversy during the Covid pandemic and appear to have gained even more traction since.

For example, from 2019to 2021 the US acted as “a major exporter of Covid-19 vaccine misinformation, with American accounts disproportionately represented as central hubs in global misinformation networks”, she said. That influenced behaviour in countries as far away as Nigeria, Ghana and Bulgaria, contributing to reduced uptake of Covid and childhood vaccines.

As a result, organisations such as the WHO and Gavi, the vaccines alliance, in their day-to-day work promoting vaccines “are increasingly confronted by vaccine hesitancy grounded in exported disinformation, much of it directly traceable to American political discourse and media,” Larson said.

Concerted efforts to undermine vaccines are rising despite the WHO’s estimate that vaccines have saved 154 million lives since 1974 – 101 million of them children – and in an era of rapid progress in medical science when new vaccines appear to offer promise on diseases for which until recently they were not used.

So how can the growing threat misinformation poses to health worldwide be tackled?

There is no obvious way to stop the authoritarian Trump and Kennedy promoting wild theories about health despite a lack of evidence. But experts say new approaches in response are needed, especially with big tech firms whose social media platforms spread so much of the scaremongering. There is a consensus that simply relying on conveying accurate information via leaflets and websites is not enough.

“While messages from Wes Streeting and professional organisations are very helpful, evidence shows that what matters to the public is the individual conversations they have with health professionals,” Bedford said, citing the many questions a parent may have before their child starts their schedule of vaccinations. “Most people trust health professionals and want to talk to them when they have concerns and questions. That can be very powerful and very influential.”

But she noted that the UK has a shortage of many types of health professionals – health visitor numbers have fallen sharply since 2015 – so how such informative and potentially reassuring conversations would happen was not obvious. A different mindset among clinicians and a bigger health workforce were needed to enable such a shift to pro-active, pre-treatment appointments, she said.

Chris van Tulleken, an NHS infectious diseases doctor and global health expert at UCL, cautioned that clinicians having such conversations should not automatically disregard the views of patients who may have suspicious, even conspiratorial views about big pharma, given some of its products have caused major harm.

“We have to meet people where they are. If you just tweet with the hashtag ‘vaccines work’, which some people do, the difficulty is that there are some vaccines with serious side-effects. I run a clinic where we’re cautious about certain vaccines,” he said.

Last year the WHO agreed a partnership with TikTok involving factchecking and the social media company doing more to remove content that could endanger health.

The WHO’s Fides network brings together more than 1,000 health professionals who are active on social media “to amplify trustworthy content and push back against harmful misinformation”, said Dr Alex Ruani, one of those involved. “It’s essentially a ‘trusted voices’ network.” For instance, Dr Mikhail “Mike” Varshavski, one of those voices, has more than 29 million followers on social media.

Ruani said social media platforms needed to do much more. “Big tech already know how to downrank, demote, deamplify or quarantine content. These processes can and should be applied to high-risk content [about health],” she said.

“We need better risk flags and warnings at the point of exposure, a bit like how you get pop-ups for cookies or how spam filters work in email. These friction nudges can be built into browsers or apps to give people a heads-up about dodgy content before they consume or share it.”