From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavarro.

This is the Daily.

During an extraordinary televised news conference on Monday night, President Trump repeatedly gave out unproven medical advice that linked autism to Tylenol and childhood vaccines.

Today, my colleague Azeen Gerasi on what exactly Trump claimed, what decades of scientific

research actually tells us, and the confusion that the president has now created.

It's Tuesday, September 23rd.

Asian, thank you for making time for us.

After a very long day, we're reaching you at 9 p.m.

I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

I think it's hard to overstate just how unusual and at times,

literally jaw-dropping this news conference that we're going to be talking

about today was to watch, and I watched it alongside you. Yeah, I mean, I want to say that I've never

seen anything like it. The president was acting like he was a doctor, but much of what he was saying

was totally untethered from what we know from medicine. And it was potentially dangerous,

according to a lot of the doctors who watched it. So it was truly remarkable.

Well, I wonder if you can start by just describing the context for this

news conference. So I think for me, this goes back to April when the CDC announced its latest data

on the prevalence of autism among kids in the United States. And they found basically

that the numbers had continued a really long running trend of increasing, that now one in 31 kids

in the United States have an autism diagnosis. And that number is five times higher than what the CDC found when it first started collecting this data in just 2000.

So this is obviously news that is concerning, especially to our new health secretary, RFK Jr., who, you know, has spent much of his career focused on autism and even connecting autism

repeatedly over his career to vaccines. And months into his tenure, he holds this big press

...