News reports have indicated Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may point to Tylenol and folate deficiency in his promised announcement on the causes of autism. But neither Tylenol nor folate deficiency has been shown to cause autism. Some evidence has pointed away from Tylenol as a risk factor.
Q: Have many of the mass shooters been transgender?
A: The number of transgender mass shooters in the U.S. varies depending on how “mass shooting” is defined, but is relatively small. The Gun Violence Archive, which uses a broader definition, lists five mass shootings by transgender or nonbinary people since January 2013. That’s less than 0.1% of the mass shootings it says happened in that period.
Reviving an unfounded claim he has made for several years, President Donald Trump on Sept. 5 overstated the number of Americans who died in 2024 of drug overdoses, saying that he believed 300,000 or “350,000 people died last year from drugs.” A spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us the provisional number of drug overdose deaths in 2024 was 79,383, and an expert in addiction medicine told us Trump’s number was “a gross exaggeration.”
Since the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, social media users have shared posts showing, quoting or paraphrasing remarks the posts attribute to the conservative activist. Many readers have asked us to provide the facts on whether Kirk, the founder of the youth political group Turning Point USA, made several of these comments.
After the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, social media claims offering political views of the assassination and the reaction to it quickly spread. One message falsely claimed that “not a single Republican condemned” the targeted shooting of a Democratic politician in Minnesota in June. Many Republicans, including President Donald Trump, condemned it.
Heated exchanges between some senators and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a Sept. 4 hearing amplified confusion about the availability of COVID-19 vaccinations for the fall, with Kennedy misleadingly claiming that “anybody” can still get a vaccine. HHS policies have created roadblocks to vaccine access.
A large Danish study recently provided reassurance that aluminum-containing vaccines are not associated with increased rates of chronic health conditions in children, including autism. But Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. misrepresented the study’s findings, claiming that the paper’s supplementary data “shows calamitous evidence of harm.”
President Donald Trump said on Truth Social on Sept. 2, “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!” That’s not the case, experts told us, and Chicago’s overall homicide rate declined more than 30% in the first six months of this year as compared with last year.
At a Cabinet meeting on Aug. 26, President Donald Trump proposed seeking the death penalty for anyone convicted of murder in Washington, D.C., claiming the death penalty is “a very strong preventative.” But the research, which has been difficult to conduct, is inconclusive on whether capital punishment is a deterrent.
Amid upheaval at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including the firing of the agency’s director, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. distorted the facts to falsely claim that the agency’s website lists abortion as one of the “10 greatest advances in medical science.”
