Tylenol’s 70-year history: From kids’ drug to political controversy

Megan Molteni reports on discoveries from the frontiers of genomic medicine, neuroscience, and reproductive tech. She joined STAT in 2021 after covering health and science at WIRED. You can reach Megan on Signal at mmolteni.13.

It’s been 70 years since Philadelphia-based McNeil Laboratories introduced the first pure acetaminophen product to American consumers: Elixir Tylenol, a prescription painkiller and fever treatment for kids. Advertised as being “for little hotheads,” the medicine came in a red paper carton shaped like a fire engine.

Since then, it’s become one of the world’s most ubiquitous drugs, but also one whose safety has periodically been challenged, as it was this week when President Trump forcefully and publicly urged pregnant women to abstain from taking Tylenol, asserting, without clear scientific evidence, a potential link to autism.

It’s perhaps surprising that a product so widely used would become a medicinal scapegoat. Trump’s statements at an extraordinary press conference Monday have drawn a flood of pushback from medical societies, autism organizations, and pediatric experts. But acetaminophen’s long and twisting origin story, going back four centuries to indigenous people’s use of the cinnamon-colored bark of the Cinchona tree in the febrile jungles of Peru, is pocked with safety scares — sometimes unfounded, other times real. It’s a history that casts just enough ambient uncertainty to invite in the type of conspiratorial thinking fueling the politically ascendant Make America Healthy Again movement.