Health Institutions Stayed Silent as False Acetaminophen-Autism Claims Spread Online, Audit Finds

When false claims linking acetaminophen use during pregnancy to autism surged across social media in September 2025, the families most affected by the controversy looked to trusted pediatric institutions for guidance. According to new research presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics 2026 National Conference & Exhibition in San Diego, most of those institutions failed to deliver. A systematic audit of public Instagram accounts operated by leading children’s hospitals, professional medical societies, and state health departments found that only a small fraction of these organizations posted anything addressing the misinformation, and those that did often waited weeks to do so. The study, titled “Administrative Gaps in Digital Patient Engagement: An Audit of Institutional Responsiveness to the 2025 Acetaminophen-Autism Controversy,” offers one of the most detailed looks yet at how slowly the institutional health communication apparatus moves when a fast-moving misinformation event collides with the pace of social media.

The research team, led by Jessica Visone, a second-year medical student at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, with contributions from Kathryn Whitehill, MD, and medical students Shivani Srivastava and Katherine Poole, conducted a cross-sectional audit of 65 public Instagram accounts between September 22 and November 15, 2025. The sample was deliberately constructed to capture the organizations families trust most: the top children’s hospitals for pediatric and adolescent behavioral health, professional medical societies, and the state health departments serving the largest pediatric populations in the country. The starting date was not arbitrary. On September 22, 2025, the White House issued messaging linking prenatal acetaminophen use to autism, a claim made despite the absence of causal evidence, and the resulting controversy spread rapidly across platforms. The researchers used the American Academy of Pediatrics as a benchmark, measuring time to first relevant post, the proportion of controversy-related content, and the quality of that content.

The headline finding was stark. Only 14 of the 65 institutions, or 21.5 percent, posted any content addressing the controversy or correcting the false claims about acetaminophen and autism. The American Academy of Pediatrics was the clear outlier in responsiveness: it posted on Day 1 of the study window and published 10 relevant posts across the period. At the other end of the spectrum, none of the state health departments posted any relevant content at all, and children’s hospitals that did respond lagged as long as 51 days behind the AAP’s first post. In practical terms, that means a family scrolling Instagram in late September could have encountered viral claims connecting a common fever and pain medication to autism, with no corrective message from their state health authority or their children’s hospital for weeks, if ever.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the audit is what it says about why the silence occurred. The researchers found that non-responding institutions were not inactive. Some of the organizations that never addressed the acetaminophen controversy published more than 100 posts on unrelated topics during the same study period. That detail, the authors argue, suggests the institutional silence reflected an administrative choice rather than a limitation of capacity or staffing. The infrastructure to communicate existed and was actively being used; it simply was not activated in response to a public health misinformation crisis. Visone framed the finding as a matter of institutional responsibility, noting that major health organizations have a duty to communicate with the populations they serve during times of increased health misinformation, and that at such moments there is nothing more powerful than the truth when it comes to population health.

The quality analysis added a second layer of concern. Among the 26 relevant posts that were published across all institutions, 85 percent used plain-language formatting and myth-busting framing, techniques that communication researchers generally consider best practice for countering misinformation. Myth-busting framing typically involves explicitly naming the false claim, warning readers that it is false, and then substituting the correct information, an approach designed to avoid reinforcing the misconception. Yet even the posts that followed these conventions fell short on accessibility. The average reading level of the relevant posts, measured using the Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula, was grade 11.4, well above the average 8th-grade reading level of adults in the United States. The researchers also assessed readability using the SMOG index, alongside checks for multilingual availability and accessibility features.

That reading-level gap matters because readability formulas estimate the years of education needed to comprehend a text. Content written at an 11th-grade level is effectively inaccessible to a substantial share of the adult population, including many of the pregnant patients and parents of young children most directly targeted by the acetaminophen claims. Compounding the problem, the audit identified no multilingual content across any of the institutions studied, meaning Spanish-speaking families and other non-English speakers had no institutionally produced corrective content in their own languages. For a misinformation event that specifically concerned decisions made during pregnancy, the absence of accessible, translated guidance represents a significant equity gap in the digital public health response.

The study’s methodology reflects a growing effort to bring quantitative rigor to the evaluation of health communication. All analyses were conducted in R version 4.5.3, and the team coded posts for format, content framing, emotional tone, and accessibility features. One of the study’s figures visualizes the timeline of institutional responses as horizontal bars measuring the number of days from September 22, 2025, to each institution’s first relevant Instagram post, with point sizes indicating the total number of relevant posts each institution published. State health departments are absent from that figure entirely, because they had no posts to depict. A second figure breaks down the prevalence of content quality and accessibility features across the 26 relevant posts, grouped by format, framing, tone, and accessibility, providing a template other researchers could apply to future controversies.

The authors argue that the findings point to a gap in administrative infrastructure and policy, not merely in content creation. Their proposed remedy is concrete: pediatric health systems should develop standardized rapid-response protocols that include pre-approved messaging templates written at or below an 8th-grade reading level, multilingual versions of those templates, and clear internal processes for activating effective and accessible communication when emerging controversies arise. The AAP’s Day 1 response demonstrates, the researchers contend, that rapid, high-quality digital communication is achievable even during a fast-moving health controversy. The problem is not that the standard is unreachable; it is that most organizations in the sample never attempted to meet it, leaving families without institutional guidance during an active misinformation event.

The broader significance of the audit extends beyond the acetaminophen controversy itself. As social media grows in popularity as a source of medical information, the pathways by which families encounter health claims have fundamentally changed, and institutional communication strategies have not kept pace. A misinformation event can now reach millions of users within hours, while the audit shows institutional responses arriving on a timescale of weeks or months, if at all. Visone is scheduled to present the abstract during the Oct. 2-6 conference in San Diego, with a poster presentation for the Section on Administration and Practice Management and a featured appearance at a press Soundbite Session. The study offers a practical framework for evaluating and strengthening institutional communication capacity, and its central lesson is likely to resonate with health communicators well beyond pediatrics: in the modern information environment, the speed, readability, and language accessibility of official responses are not secondary concerns but core determinants of whether accurate health information reaches the public at all.

Subject of Research: Institutional responsiveness of pediatric health organizations to acetaminophen-autism misinformation on Instagram

Article Title: Social media analysis finds health institutions delayed or did not respond to false claims inking autism to acetaminophen use during pregnancy

Article References: Social media analysis finds health institutions delayed or did not respond to false claims inking autism to acetaminophen use during pregnancy. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: acetaminophen, autism, health misinformation, social media, Instagram, pediatrics, American Academy of Pediatrics, health communication, children's hospitals, state health departments, readability, public health