Welp.
Still a crook any way you look
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Johnson and Johnson, accusing the pharmaceutical company of failing to warn consumers about the risk of taking Tylenol while pregnant.
This lawsuit, the first of its kind from a state government, comes a month after President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced updated guidance discouraging pregnant women from taking acetaminophen, citing it as a possible cause of autism. The announcement set off a wave of controversy in the health care community, and confusion among pregnant women unsure how they should manage fever and pain during pregnancy.
The science around Tylenol and autism is uncertain. While some studies suggest a correlation between taking Tylenol while pregnant and having a child with autism, others have repudiated those findings. Major medical associations rejected Kennedy and Trump’s claims as overly generalized and potentially harmful.
“The conditions people use acetaminophen to treat during pregnancy are far more dangerous than any theoretical risks and can create severe morbidity and mortality for the pregnant person and the fetus,” Dr. Steven J. Fleischman, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement.
But this issue has been bubbling up for far longer than Trump and Kennedy have been in office. Dozens of people have filed personal injury lawsuits against Johnson and Johnson, and its corporate spin-off, Kenvue, alleging adverse neurodevelopment outcomes for their children after taking Tylenol while pregnant.
Those cases have been consolidated into multi-district litigation, which is still making its way through the courts and being led by Ashley Keller of Chicago law firm Keller Postman. Keller has represented Texas in litigation against Google and Meta, and has been contracted by the attorney general’s office to handle this new lawsuit against Johnson and Johnson.
“[Paxton] figured I knew the science, I knew the history, I knew a lot of the moving parts,” Keller said in an interview. “And so I’d be an obvious choice to pursue this for Texans.”
There’s more but I’m not going to dwell on this. Ken Paxton is, among many other things, a try-hard and a bandwagon-jumper, and he’s got a primary to win. The science is not on his side, but that doesn’t mean that he – or let’s be real, a future AG because this sucker is going to take years to conclude – can’t win. Some kind of lowball no-fault-admitted NDA-ed up the wazoo settlement down the line is a possible outcome. For now, Paxton got the headlines. I doubt he cares much or has thought much beyond that.