FIR #483: How Tylenol Handled a High-Profile Falsehood

Oct 9, 2025

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Kenvue’s stock tumbled when U.S. President Donald Trump, with Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., standing behind him, declared that its product, Tylenol, leads to autism in children when taken by mothers during pregnancy. As social channels were flooded with misinformation supporting the evidenceless claim, it’s easy to imagine the stock continuing to slide, mirroring the trajectory launched by attacks on Bud Light.

Remarkably, the stock recovered after one day, thanks largely to Tylenol’s savvy and almost perfect response to the crisis.

Tylenol isn’t the first brand to find itself in President Trump’s crosshairs. It is unlikely to be the last. In this short, midweek episode, Neville and Shel explore what the company got right, and what other companies can do to prepare for their turn in the glare of the presidential spotlight.

Links from this episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, October 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on [Neville’s blog](https://www.nevillehobson.io/) and [Shel’s blog](https://holtz.com/blog/).

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

@nevillehobson (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode number 483 of For Immediate Release. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz (00:07)
And this is Shel Holtz in the U.S.

If you manage a brand today, here’s a scenario you actually have to plan for. A single, high-profile figure with a massive audience declares your product dangerous without credible evidence. And the story just blows up across cable, X, TikTok, the news. This is not a hypothetical. That’s where Tylenol found itself after President Trump asserted that acetaminophen taken during pregnancy can lead to autism.

The claim doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny, but it did what these claims always do. It spread, it stuck, and it spooked people. So what do you do when your product is suddenly the villain of the day? The Darden School at the University of Virginia framed the choice starkly. You can keep your head down and hope the cycle moves on, or you can push back fast, clearly, and repeatedly. Their advice leans hard to option two, anchored in what they call the four Ts.

timeliness, transparency, trust, and tenacity. Respond quickly, show your work, over-communicate the facts, and stick with it longer than the news cycle would suggest. Importantly, don’t get into a personality contest with the attacker. Keep it respectful but firm, and put your history, your standards, and your science front and center. Crisis pros will recognize that playbook. Forbes Crisis columnist Edward Siegel made a similar argument the same day.

Assume confusion is your default environment. Get your narrative out immediately and synchronize legal, medical, and corporate voices before the vacuum fills with speculation. He also stresses preparation. If you wait to write the plan until you’re trending, you’re already too late. So how did Tylenol’s maker Kenview do? On speed and tone, they moved quickly and they stayed in their lane. In on-air and short-form video responses, they reiterated a constant message.

Acetaminophen remains the recommended first-line option for pain and fever in pregnancy when used as directed, and their guidance has not changed. No name-calling, no politics, just reinforcement of established guidance and a promise to keep sharing facts as they have them. They also benefited from credible third parties saying what they couldn’t credibly say about themselves.

And I remember this from my days at Allergan. We had a medical advisory board made up of ophthalmologists that we could turn to to make public statements. They didn’t receive money from us. They were volunteers, but they were tied to us. They were familiar with our products and could be very, very helpful as credible third party voices. In the Tylenol case, major medical organizations publicly pushed back on the claim.

@nevillehobson (02:39)
and

Shel Holtz (02:53)
emphasizing the lack of evidence for a causal link and the potential risks of not treating fever during pregnancy. That chorus was immediate and visible in mainstream coverage, which matters because parents weren’t going to go spelunking in PubMed in the middle of a scare. They wanted to hear doctors on the six o’clock news. Another thing Kenview got right, they didn’t let market rumors set the narrative. While the stock dipped on day one, as you might expect,

It rebounded the next day as cooler heads and clearer information landed. That’s a reminder to communicators that investors are another primary audience in these moments. You can’t let medical misinformation turn into a capital market story because you were slow to brief. There was also a potential booby trap that Kenview navigated reasonably well. An old context-free social post about pregnant women avoiding Tylenol started recirculating.

and was seized on by partisan accounts as an aha proof point. The brand clarified the context and restated its guidance. The lesson for the rest of us is that social archeology is part of the crisis prep. Now, you need a rapid old posts review the moment a story breaks so you can get ahead of whatever’s about to be resurfaced. Zooming out, there are broader takeaways for communicators whose brands could be targeted by a political figure or

anyone with a megaphone and a base. First, build your science bench before you need it. You want independent credentialed experts ready to validate or correct claims within hours, not days. That means pre-briefing medical societies, key opinion leaders, and credible third party validators about your safety data and your monitoring plan. The Darden piece got it right. Facts alone rarely win the day, but facts delivered by trusted humans stand a fighting chance. Second,

Treat employees as a primary audience. In moments like this, they’re your most important ambassadors and your most vulnerable stakeholders. Darden explicitly calls out the need to communicate aggressively with your own employees. Give them the message, the FAQs and the why, and equip managers to handle tough conversations at the school gate, the church picnic, and inside the store aisle. Third, scenario test the politics.

This is not a normal product risk issue, it’s identity content. You can expect pylons, boycotts, and gotcha screenshots. Prepare neutral, values-based language that focuses on consumer safety and evidence, not the personalities involved. Resist the temptation to litigate the attacker’s credibility. Let other people do that. In this case, RFK, there are plenty of people piling on him. You don’t need to do that as the brand. Your brand should sound like the adult in the room.

Fourth, integrate legal early, but don’t let them throttle your speed. You can say quite a lot quite fast without increasing liability. Reaffirm established guidance linked to authoritative sources, explain how you evaluate safety signals, and spell out what you’re doing next. The clock is your biggest risk variable. Finally, run an always-on listening program that’s tuned not just to your brand terms, but to the themes and communities.

that could turn you into the next culture war football. When the first sparks fly, rapid response should include fact cards, short explainers on video and exec posts that can be embedded by newsrooms and creators alike because that’s how information travels now. So what kind of grade would we give Kenview? On the essentials, speed, message discipline, reliance on credible third parties and investor signaling.

I think it’s a solid B plus, A minus. There’s room to go further on pre-bunking misinformation with evergreen explainers that can be resurfaced instantly and on employee and retailer toolkits for frontline conversations. But in a modern misinformation storm, their posture, firm, factual, and unflappable, was the right one. And for the rest of us, the homework is clear. Write the plan now, build the bench now.

and decide in advance how you’ll sound when that moment comes because at some point for some brand it’s coming.

@nevillehobson (07:10)
It’s quite a story, isn’t it, Shell? I mean, it’s listening to how you explained it all, thinking this is probably one of those moments for any large brand, I suppose, who could think that could be us because you have a critic in the form of the U.S. president who comes out with things, says things. And as all the reporting I’ve seen talks about with that, shred of car sign evidence to back up his claims.

but plenty of factual information has been around for long time that challenge it totally to dismiss it all. Could that happen to, let’s say, know, Ford Motor Company, one of their carts where President Trump is going to say this car is dreadful, they’ve had 50 recalls, which isn’t true, of course, and people have died needlessly through car accidents because they didn’t take care of whatever. The next day or the day after it’s dismissed as but in the meantime,

you know, 50 buyers across the US aren’t going to buy that truck anymore. So things like that. It’s that’s the environment, isn’t it? You can’t, you can’t plan for that normally. But we’re not in a normal landscape, are we? If this kind of thing goes on.

Shel Holtz (08:16)
No, not at all. And the Darden piece did make the point that you need to prepare for boycotts. They’re going to happen in this environment. this response that we saw from Darden and from others in terms of how Kenview, the maker of Tylenol, handled it, focused on products that are science-based. There are other products out there that are more engineering-based or based on some other field.

that could easily become targets as well. And we talk about Trump with this type of behavior, but remember this is something that his secretary of health and human services presented to him that then he then presented. And I think what you’re going to see in the post Trump Republican party is respect for his playbook. And you’re going to see this kind of behavior continue.

under a prospective president Vance, for example, or at the state level with the governors. And I don’t wanna limit this to the political right. I people who see this working on the extreme left could end up employing the same tactics. You can’t look at this as a communicator, as a political thing, even though that’s exactly what it is.

which is why the advice from Darden, which is exactly what Kenview did, was don’t engage at the political level, engage at the scientific level, engage at the fact level, but stay away from pointing fingers or getting into a one-on-one argument with a political figure.

@nevillehobson (09:47)
The difficulty though, particularly in the United States, I would say, Sheldon, is that we’re at a moment where everything is polarized completely. And so you’re out there with facts, scientific evidence, the works. And there is this group over here who’ve got their spin on the facts and they’ve got loud voices and a lot of people listen to them.

potentially, I would argue inclined to listen to that kind of denial, like the anti-vaxxers and all these conspiracy theorists. So we would bring out those kinds of people, in which case, it’s almost like you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t. If you don’t say anything, you’re damned. If you do say anything, you’re damned. But I think that that’s the additional challenge. And I would say you still got to go out there with factual scientific backed information or whatever, as advised by the

the folks you’ve been quoting. But it’s not a not a pretty place to be a player in. Because it could go horribly wrong. Your jet your attention is on you no matter what. And is it your story that people are paying attention to or the other guy’s story? Or is it a big question mark, people start then questioning all the scientific evidence which has already happened with this. So I seen quite a bit.

here in the UK of talk about this in the mainstream media, plus in medical journals, too. The medical journals actually have been extremely forthright in their dismissal of Trump’s claims, which is really mirroring what others are saying in dismissing it. There’s no evidence to prove this. Yet I wonder, as we’ve talked before, and it’s kind of the basics of how you plan a crisis communication.

approach, I suppose, where logic isn’t what is going to work. Ultimately, it’s the emotional element. I don’t know what that translates as something like this. You got to stick to your guns, of course. And if you do have facts, you shouldn’t not produce them simply because others criticize them and saying they’re denying them saying this is fake. So and in fact, challenging those people logically just doesn’t make much sense, I think. So it’s probably a storm. Somehow you have to weather.

And I think there are examples you mentioned already on how you would do that. But I think you would you would likely be wise to assume or to say that we need to look at the worst case scenario here, not the best case scenario. What’s the worst case that could happen that it turns into a complete trashing of your company and all your brands, for instance. And there’s fake evidence being produced all over that. Yes, it does kill people if they take your product, this kind of thing.

So it’s not an enviable place, but that is the landscape, isn’t it? With regard to almost anyone with a brand and a good news story or making a product that’s beneficial to people, there are people coming out of the woodwork who have all sorts of things to say to trash what you’re doing and the fact that your product is not safe at all. It’s a hell of an environment show, that’s a fact.

Shel Holtz (12:42)
It is, but it’s the environment we’re living in. So being prepared, I think, is critical these days. I didn’t check, and I probably should have. When Tylenol was owned by Johnson & Johnson, they had a credo. It was four stakeholder audiences in the order that the company prioritized them, and patients were first. And you may remember, of course, this is not the first crisis that Tylenol has faced.

@nevillehobson (12:45)
you

Shel Holtz (13:08)
Back in the 80s, there was the product tampering in the Chicago area that led to several deaths. And even though we tend to look at this now a little more idealized than the response actually was, it’s still a case study that is taught in business schools everywhere that they eventually pulled the product nationally, even though there was no evidence that.

there were any tampered products outside of the Chicago area. And their public statements were that we’re doing this because our credo says that we put patients first and we’re not willing to put anybody at risk. The shareholder, by the way, was last on the credo list. think was employees were second, the communities in which they operate were third and shareholders were last.

And their philosophy said, if we take care of the first three shareholders will be just fine. And in fact, when they reintroduced Tylenol, it was with a safety cap that they innovated. And that led a lot of customers of other pain relievers to switch to Tylenol because their product didn’t have a safety cap. By the time the competition caught up and developed their own safety caps, these were all now Tylenol customers. So the shareholders ended up just fine.

@nevillehobson (14:12)
Hmm.

Shel Holtz (14:21)
And I like that approach. But the point is that what they ended up appealing to, even though they might not have characterized it this way, was the emotions of the public. It’s, they care about us. And I think as long as you can maintain that emotional connection that we care about you, not just putting out scientific data. And I think this is where a lot of that third party comes in.

These people want women to suffer with fevers and pain during pregnancy when there is no evidence that taking Tylenol will hurt. I’m waiting for that first report of somebody who would not take Tylenol, developed a fever and died or miscarried or what have you emerges. You know the media is gonna be all over that when it happens. So again, there’s so many dimensions involved in preparing yourself. The nice thing about

@nevillehobson (14:47)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (15:10)
This story that I don’t think Kenview had to worry about was a lot of the third party reporting. You saw the doctors that the cable networks typically go to when there’s a medical related story and they were so contemptuous of this report that anybody who’s watching and of course the wrong people weren’t watching, but you didn’t need to hear from Kenview in order to understand that

This is bunk. I mean, it was third parties who made the point that autism existed before Tylenol did. So if Tylenol is responsible for this, where did all these previous cases come from? And for those who suggest that, well, there has been an increase in the number of autism cases, that’s not true. There’s been an increase in the number of diagnoses because autism is not that old a diagnosis and as more and more doctors.

recognize it, they are making that diagnosis. So leaving that information for third parties to convey while you stay in your lane, as Darden put it, I think is a good idea if you’re the type of organization that has those third parties available or already on the hook to go out and speak on your behalf.

@nevillehobson (16:20)
Yeah, I think one other thought that one of the links you shared is an Adweek report that Yahoo News reported that the headline says it all really, titles just the latest brand Trump has picked to fight with. And there are a handful of things that will be in recent memory for every listener to this podcast. We’ve talked about some of these on previous episodes. John Deere, the agricultural equipment manufacturer.

that Trump threatened them with 200 % tariffs on everything that they want to sell in the US if they move manufacturing from Iowa to Mexico because of the tariffs. They went ahead and did it anyway. I’ve not seen what the consequences were for them, but they went ahead and did it anyway. Macy’s, the department store, Mexican immigrants are bringing drugs and bringing crime and were rapists in America. That’s what Trump was saying about that.

So that’s a deal with that. Apple, well, they’re talking about manufacturing in China with the phones. Thailand, we’re discussing now. Boeing, talks about them. Jaguar cars, he has strong opinions about their new logo and rebranding. That’s extraordinary for a politician, nevermind someone who’s the president of a country with those kind of opinions. But he’s different kind of person. And I guess the latest probably, this American brand,

Cracker Barrel, we have a similar brand here in the UK, but it’s not to be confused with this one, that he talked about that he described it as woke, the rebrand that when they went through this rebranding, they should go back to the old logo, he said on more than one occasion. And people are trying to figure out why why why he bothered him so much. Anyway, it did. And he said they should admit a mistake and go back to the old one and the restaurant chain.

did in fact go back to the old logo. So that’s the nature of things. So hence, you’re a big brand, you’ve got high visibility, you need to factor this into your crisis plan.

Shel Holtz (18:13)
Yeah, it must frustrate a lot of brand managers to hear advice to stay in your lane when the person attacking you is in every lane all at once. We’ll absolutely not stay in his lane. So yeah, and that’ll be a 30 for this episode of Four Immediate Release.

@nevillehobson (18:25)
Extraordinary.

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