Welcome to Talking Fed's one-on-one, deep-dive discussions with national figures about the most fascinating and consequential issues defining our culture and shaping our lives.

I'm your host, Harry Littman. Well, more, what shall we call it,

idiosyncratic, maybe wacky, health advice from the administration, and it's on the one hand,

kind of risible, but on the other, no joke given its potential for harm. As always, when health matters and policy come up together,

we turn to the best combined medical policy analyst out there. That, of course, is Dr. Kavita Patel.

She served in the Obama White House as director of policy for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement.

That's a governmental mouthful, isn't it? And now works as a primary care physician, yay, really hands-on,

and a leading health policy research. And she's also a professor of medicine at Stanford,

a regular contributor to NBC and MSNBC News.

It's really good to talk with you.

Let me just start with something.

Probably not the wackiest, maybe up there, but I'm sure has really caught the attention of nearly every American home.

That would be Tylenol.

So President Trump last week announced that women shouldn't take it

while pregnant, that they need to try to tough it out instead, and that the FDA will be

notifying doctors to adjust their guidance accordingly. This is all because he says the key ingredient to citamiphan

can cause autism. Where in the world did this announcement come from? What kernel of possible

truth does it have or not have? How bad is it? Man oh man, you know, are we, are we,

bleach COVID part two? What the heck? Yeah, that's what I started asking myself, like,

where am I and is this reality, can't discern what's truth from fiction these days

and seems like there's no line in between. So I'll give, I'll give, as the kids say, the TLDR on

kind of where this came from. And by the way, this has been, you know, a rough kind of go for Tylenol for

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