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Acetaminophen, known by the brand names Tylenol and Panadol, is the most widely used drug ingredient in the U.S., taken by more than 50 million Americans every week.1 Most don’t think twice about popping a couple of Tylenol tablets to take the edge off a headache or other minor aches and pains, believing it to be a relatively benign over-the-counter medication choice.
Even acetaminophen comes with risks, however. Those linked to liver damage are well known, but it’s now emerging that acetaminophen has other unintended effects in your body — effects that may influence your behavior, emotions and psychological processes. Taken together, if you don’t have to use acetaminophen, don’t — it’s best to avoid using this drug unless absolutely necessary.
Acetaminophen, which is found in over 600 medicines, is used by 23% of the U.S. population weekly,2 mostly for its pain- and fever-reducing effects. But along with blunting your pain, it may also be dampening your response to risks, such that you become more likely to take them while using the drug.
Researchers from The Ohio State University recruited 189 college students to take part in the study. They were given either 1,000 milligrams (mg) of acetaminophen or a placebo, then, once the drug took effect, they were asked to rate various activities based on risk on a scale of 1 to 7.
Those who took acetaminophen rated the activities, which included things like walking home alone at night in an unsafe area or bungee jumping, as less risky than those who took the placebo. In another study by the same researchers, undergraduate students took part in a test to measure risk-taking behavior.3
The study involved clicking a button to inflate a balloon on a computer. As it inflated, they were rewarded with money, but if it got too big and burst, they lost it all. Students who took acetaminophen were more likely to keep pumping the balloon and had more balloons burst than students not taking the drug.
“If you’re risk-averse, you may pump a few times and then decide to cash out because you don’t want the balloon to burst and lose your money,” study co-author Baldin Way said in a news release. “But for those who are on acetaminophen, as the balloon gets bigger, we believe they have less anxiety and less negative emotion about how big the balloon is getting and the possibility of it bursting.”4
Taking more risks on the laboratory test has been linked to increased risk-taking outside of the lab, including driving without a seatbelt, using drugs and alcohol and stealing. This is what has the researchers concerned, especially considering how widespread acetaminophen usage is.
“Acetaminophen seems to make people feel less negative emotion when they consider risky activities — they just don’t feel as scared,” Way said. “With nearly 25 percent of the population in the U.S. taking acetaminophen each week, reduced risk perceptions and increased risk-taking could have important effects on society.”5
If you take acetaminophen, you expect it to dull your physical pain, but it may also blunt your emotions, both positive and negative. A series of studies, conducted by Way and colleagues, involved showing college students 40 photographs designed to elicit positive, neutral or negative emotions.6 The students were given 1,000 mg of acetaminophen or a placebo 60 minutes prior to viewing the photos.
The students were asked to rate the photos on a scale of -5 (extremely negative) to +5 (extremely positive), as well as rate how much emotion the photo made them feel. Those who took acetaminophen rated the photos as less extreme on either end of the spectrum, and also had more neutral emotional reactions.
“People who took acetaminophen didn’t feel the same highs or lows as did the people who took placebos,” Way said in a news release.7 They then conducted a similar study asking people to evaluate not only the emotional content of photos, but also how much of the color blue it contained. They were trying to determine if acetaminophen affected perceptions that weren’t emotional in nature.
Again, the participants who took acetaminophen had emotional reactions that were significantly blunted, but the judgments of blue color content were similar among everyone. This suggests acetaminophen affects emotional evaluations but not magnitude judgments, such as color content.8
Acetaminophen is not only a painkiller but also an “empathy killer,” Way and colleagues wrote in a 2016 study published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.9 Empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand their feelings and point of view, is a character trait that benefits society and individuals in multiple ways.
Those who feel empathy for others’ pain and suffering may trigger prosocial actions, for instance, or curb aggressive behaviors. It’s also known that when people observe others experiencing pain, brain regions are activated that also light up in response to our own pain.10 This suggests empathy for pain may share similar neural and psychological processes as the experience of physical pain.
Again, Way and colleagues conducted a series of studies to compare subjects’ responses to others’ physical or social pain. After receiving acetaminophen or a placebo, they read scenarios about another’s pain, watched ostracism in the lab or witnessed other participants being exposed to painful noise blasts.
The acetaminophen users had significantly fewer empathic responses compared to those who took a placebo. The researchers explained:11
“As hypothesized, acetaminophen reduced empathy in response to others’ pain. Acetaminophen also reduced the unpleasantness of noise blasts delivered to the participant, which mediated acetaminophen's effects on empathy.
Together, these findings suggest that the physical painkiller acetaminophen reduces empathy for pain and provide a new perspective on the neurochemical bases of empathy. Because empathy regulates prosocial and antisocial behavior, these drug-induced reductions in empathy raise concerns about the broader social side effects of acetaminophen …”
The pain caused by social rejection is another area where acetaminophen unexpectedly interferes. Those who took acetaminophen daily for three weeks reported less social pain on a daily basis compared to those who took a placebo.12
Further, when the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity in the participants, the drug reduced neural responses to social rejection in areas previously linked to the distress of social pain and physical pain.
“Acetaminophen reduces behavioral and neural responses associated with the pain of social rejection, demonstrating substantial overlap between social and physical pain,” the researchers noted.13 Indeed, the pain of social rejection can feel like a literal painful blow, but the problem with taking acetaminophen to blunt it is that positive emotions are also affected, meaning chronic users may have a dulled existence.
When Way and colleagues again gave 1,000 mg of acetaminophen or placebo to subjects, then measured their response to positive empathy, these positive feelings were blunted; those taking acetaminophen did not experience the same uplifting feelings as others did when reading about others’ positive experiences.14
“Results showed that acetaminophen reduced personal pleasure and other-directed empathic feelings in response to these scenarios,” Way and colleagues wrote, adding that this also has societal implications since positive empathy is related to prosocial behavior.
When acetaminophen affects your brain’s responses to social rejection, empathy and more, it also extends to other cognitive processes, possibly making them less effective. In another trial, participants who took either acetaminophen or a placebo performed a test to gauge decision-making abilities.
They had to click a button when the letter F appeared on a computer screen but not hit the button when an E was shown. Those who took acetaminophen performed worse on the test, suggesting the drug may lead to greater errors or flaws in decision making, and may also inhibit broader evaluative processes in the brain.15
Lead author Dan Randles, a postdoctoral fellow in the psychology department at University of Toronto, said in an interview with Forbes:16
"… [A]cetaminophen not only affects physical pain, but also feelings of social rejection, uncertainty and evaluative processing … This study is the first to provide compelling evidence that acetaminophen is affecting all of these symptoms by reducing the distress associated with any kind of cognitive conflict; whether the source is physical, social or more abstract."
After long being recommended as a safe pain reliever during pregnancy, it was revealed in 2014 that acetaminophen is in fact a hormone disruptor,17 casting doubts on its safe use during pregnancy.
According to that 2014 study, use of acetaminophen during pregnancy was associated with a 37% increased risk of their child being diagnosed with hyperkinetic disorder, a severe form of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Their children were also up to 30% more likely to be prescribed ADHD medication by the time they were 7 years old.18 A study published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2019 further strengthened the link between acetaminophen use and ADHD, while also noting an increased risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD).19 Aside from a higher risk of neurodevelopmental problems, studies have also shown:
Yet another reason to be extremely cautious with regard to acetaminophen is its negative effects on your liver. Acetaminophen is the top cause of acute liver failure in the U.S. It can even be toxic to your liver at recommended doses when taken daily for just a couple of weeks.23
Part of the reason for the risk is that acetaminophen's recommended dose and the amount of the drug that causes an overdose are very close. There is not much margin of safety, and because acetaminophen is found in so many over-the-counter medications, it’s easy to double- or triple-up without even realizing it.
Even taking just a little more acetaminophen than the recommended dose over a few days or weeks (referred to as "staggered overdosing") is dangerous, and can be deadlier than one large overdose.24 There are other risks to acetaminophen that haven’t been covered here, including potentially fatal skin reactions.
California state regulators are even considering adding acetaminophen to the list of carcinogens covered by Proposition 6525 because it’s related to phenacetin, an over-the-counter painkiller banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1983 because of links to cancer.
Considering its many risks, I don’t recommend using acetaminophen for minor aches and pains. Instead, try one of the many natural pain relief options available that can provide relief without drugs.
As detailed in "Spy Agencies Threaten to 'Take Out' Mercola," this website has been labeled a national security threat by British and American intelligence agencies that are collaborating to eliminate "anti-vaccine propaganda" from public discussion using sophisticated cyberwarfare tools.1,2,3
In a December 22, 2020, article,4 The Hill claims the "anti-vaccination movement sees COVID-19 as an opportunity" to strengthen its position, stating that "As public health officials seek to reassure Americans on the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine, anti-vaccine efforts could prevent the country from reaching herd immunity."
According to a November 9, 2020, report in The Times,5 the British "government regards tackling false information about COVID-19 vaccination as a rising priority," ostensibly for the same reason. But does concern for implementation of public health policy really justify the use of cyberwarfare against those who raise questions about vaccine safety?
Wouldn't vaccine safety be part and parcel of a successful public health campaign? Doesn't public trust play a significant part as well? The fact that they're trying to shut down any and all conversations about vaccines — using warfare tactics no less — suggests that the planned mass vaccination campaign has very little to do with keeping the public healthy and safe. It's about controlling the public, for some undisclosed purpose.
In July 2020, Imran Ahmed, a member of the Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force under the British government's Commission for Countering Extremism and the chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), told The Independent6 he considers anti-vaxxers "an extremist group that pose a national security risk," because "once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it's easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism."
In other words, Ahmed implies that people who question the safety and necessity of a COVID-19 vaccine might be prone to violent extremism — a defamatory statement that has no basis in reality.
In its report, "The Anti-Vaxx Playbook,"7 CCDH identifies six leading online "anti-vaxxers" — Barbara Loe Fisher, Joseph Mercola, Del Bigtree, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Sherri Tenpenny and Andrew Wakefield — and outlined an alleged anti-vaxxer "plan to attack a forthcoming COVID vaccine" based on remarks made by speakers during the Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination, sponsored by the non-profit, Nacional Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) and held online October 16 through 18, 2020.
According to The Washington Post,8 the report quotes "leaked audio" from the conference. Similarly, in a December 22, 2020, Twitter post,9 the CCDH states that "Anti-vaxxers have been meeting secretly to plan how to stop the COVID vaccine. We were there. Today we're exposing their playbook."
It's rather laughable. Just who is the conspiracy theorist here? There was no audio to be "leaked" since it was a PUBLIC conference, open to absolutely anyone and everyone, just like the previous four conferences on vaccination that NVIC has held beginning in 1997. It was openly promoted by NVIC, this website, as well as many other groups and was about as far from a "secret meeting" as you could possibly get.
Since the CCDH admitted "being there," they must have paid the nominal registration attendance fee of $80, as did more than 3,000 other registered attendees from the U.S, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa. The NVIC conference, which was originally scheduled to be held in a hotel, was produced online for the first time after COVID-19 social distancing and travel restrictions were instituted in March, 2020.
The CCDH report also lists several private Facebook groups dedicated to vaccine information, including "Vaccination Re-Education Discussion Forum," "Stop Mandatory Vaccination," "Vaccine Choices" and "Restore Liability for the Vaccine Makers."
CCDH admits tracking and spying on 425 vaccine-related Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter accounts. In all, these accounts have 59.2 million followers, "nearly 877,000 more than they had in June," CCDH notes, adding that:10
"This means that anti-vaxxers grew fast enough to outpace the removal of accounts belonging to influential figures such as Del Bigtree, Larry Cook and David Icke in that period. Those removals led to a loss of 3.2 million followers from the total, while other anti-vaxxers in our sample gained over 4.1 million …
Analysis of this year-long growth also shows the substantial contributions that alternative health entrepreneurs and conspiracy theorists make to the reach of the anti-vaccine movement.
Entrepreneurs now have 22.6 million followers, supplying two-fifths of the anti-vaccine movement's online following. Anti-vaccine conspiracy accounts grew by nearly 50 percent over the year, starting at 15.5 million followers in 2019 and rising to 23.1 million by December 2020."
According to the CCDH, "Anti-vaxxers have developed a sophisticated playbook for spreading uncertainty about a COVID vaccine."11 To counter this information, medical and scientific professionals need to "take action," by which the CCDH means they must push for COVID-19 vaccination.
"To do so, they must convince the public that COVID is dangerous and give them confidence that a vaccine is safe and effective," the CCDH writes,12 adding that anti-vaxxers "win the debate by default if a skeptical public fail to take action and use the vaccine."
Just what is the "anti-vaxx playbook"? According to the CCDH, the "playbook for spreading uncertainty" about the vaccine involves five key steps:13
In the report, the CCDH details many of the specific messages shared by me and others, such as deaths being falsely attributed to COVID-19, thereby artificially inflating mortality statistics, the fact that COVID-19 has a 99+% survival rate unless you're very old and have underlying comorbidities, and the fact that there are now several effective therapeutics for COVID-19, making a vaccine less relevant.
"Anti-vaxxers take advantage of existing media and political narratives around the speed of vaccine development to claim trials have been rushed, and that it is too soon to know if COVID vaccines are safe," the CCDH states. "Variations of this narrative highlight perceived shortcomings in clinical trials, and draw on past examples of vaccines with adverse effects."
Reading through the CCDH's report, I'm struck by the irony that none of the so-called "anti-vaxx arguments" are actually met by solid pro-vaccine counterarguments or data.
CCDH does not negate or even debate the accuracy of any of them. It just brushes them aside as misinformation and lies without providing any proof whatsoever. In fact, the report summarizes our concerns so well that I'd encourage everyone to read it.
At the end of the report, they do list a number of strategies that pro-vaccine advocates should use to counter anti-vaccine messages, but again, nowhere do they recommend leaning on published science.
Instead, it's all about shaming people who question vaccines as "conspiracy theorists," promoting harrowing stories of people who got sick with COVID-19 and "shouting about getting vaccinated."
"Recipients of the vaccine should post about getting it — such a campaign could create authentic social proof and work against the anti-vaxxers' aim of creating doubt around the safety of vaccines. 'I've had the vaccine' Twibbons and Instagram filters could also help achieve this," CCDH writes.14
Other recommendations issued by the CCDH include deplatforming anyone who questions vaccines. "Deplatforming works," they say, adding that:15
"The problem lies with a very small number of accounts. The 59 million followers of anti-vaxxer social media accounts identified in this report are following just 425 accounts, pages, groups and channels across Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.
The 10 anti-vaxxers we track with the largest cross-platform followings make up the majority of the total audience for anti-vaxxers online. These are the 'superspreaders' of anti-vaxx misinformation.
As this report has demonstrated, anti-vaxxers are concerned by the prospect of losing their privileged position on social media platforms … the evidence is clear that the best way of preventing someone falling for a conspiracy theory is to prevent them from seeing it in the first place."
The CCDH also urges legislators to "hold platforms accountable" through fines and criminal sanctions, legal liability for forum administrators and/or "transparency for the online advertising world" — in other words, warn advertisers that the platform they're supporting with their advertising dollars is promoting "medical misinformation" and "anti-vaccine conspiracy theories."
I am surprised by their recommendation because to the best I can discern, ALL the major media platforms have already censored every major site that questions vaccines many months ago. They cannot censor them any more than they already are. Most of the YouTube, Facebook and Twitter accounts have been heavily censored or deplatformed.
In the video at the top of this article, UnHerd interviews Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who is one of my favorite articulate journalists. At the end of October 2020, Greenwald resigned from The Intercept — a publication he co-founded in 2014 — after the publication refused to publish an article in which he raised a critique against presidential candidate Joe Biden.16
According to Greenwald, the refusal to publish the piece violated his "contractual right of editorial freedom." In the interview, he stresses the dangers inherent with online censorship by big tech and social media platforms. Who should be in control of "the truth"? Can anyone really be designated as the ultimate source of truth, be it about vaccines or anything else?
As noted by Greenwald, social media platforms claim the right to be the arbiters of truth by hiring so-called fact-checkers and relying on experts at the World Health Organization.
However, we have repeatedly seen the WHO issue statements that have turned out to be inaccurate or false — sometimes by their own admission — so just how reliable are they? By strictly sticking with the WHO's guidance and censoring everything else, the censors have in many instances promoted misinformation exclusively.
Greenwald gives the example of masks. In February and March 2020, the WHO did not recommend wearing face masks and actually warned they might be counterproductive. Now all of a sudden, masks are a must, even though the science hasn’t changed one bit.
In fact, the evidence that masks don't protect against viral transmission has only grown stronger. Early on the WHO also questioned whether human-to-human transmission was even possible and cast doubt on the true danger of the virus.
"That's the nature of human fallibility," Greenwald says. "What looks like a proven orthodoxy one month becomes a gross error the next, and that's exactly why these things have to be debated rather than suppressed."
When asked whether he believes nothing should ever be censored on health grounds, he wisely replies that not only do people need to rely on their own common sense when encountering information, but institutions also need to work to build credibility and public trust.
Indeed, refusing to hold a discussion about the scientific evidence does not build trust. Forcibly shutting down anyone who raises sensible questions does not build trust. Destroying the reputations and livelihoods of people who report on questions raised does not build trust.
In short, the medical industry, and the vaccine industry in particular, have severe trust and credibility deficits that they themselves created and continue to grow with the help of big tech and national intelligence agencies who are going to extreme lengths to prevent counter narratives from getting out.
Greenwald also points out that the U.S. has never before allowed government to intervene in the public discourse in this way. It should be undisputable that censorship is anathema to a democratically run, free and open society. While there may not be a benefit to allowing misinformation to be disseminated, the risks of censoring are simply too grave to be justifiable.
Big tech censorship is even more insidious than government censorship, because it's far more opaque. At least if the government says it's going to censor certain kinds of expression, there's some level of transparency in how that's being done.
Private tech companies, on the other hand, move the goal post at will, and they're never entirely clear about who will be censored, for what, exactly, or how. What's more, there's no real process for appeal. Greenwald points out that social media companies never really wanted to be in the position of being censors but were pressured into it by politicians, in some cases, and mainstream media journalists in others.
Journalists initially wanted to maintain control over the public discourse by restricting the competition's reach, and once social media companies relented and started censoring, the whole thing just snowballed and grew.
The problem we face now is that censorship fortifies power and is very difficult to end once it has taken hold. This in turn does not bode well for individual freedom or democracy as a whole. Censorship is a direct threat to both.
It also has a tendency to spread ever more widely, covering more and more topics as we go along. For example, there was active suppression and censorship of certain political issues leading up to the 2020 presidential election, and now there's censoring of evidence showing election interference. What will be next?
The fact, then, that U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies are getting involved in censoring should tell us something. It tells us it's not really about protecting public health. It's about strengthening government control over the population. The fact that intelligence agencies view vaccine safety advocates as a national security threat also tells us that government is now in the business of protecting private companies, essentially blurring the line between the two.
If you criticize one you criticize the other. In short, if you impede or endanger the profitability of private companies, you are now viewed as a national security threat, and this falls squarely within the parameters of technocracy, in which government is dissolved and replaced with the unelected leaders of private enterprise.
The right and freedom to critique one's government is a hallmark of democracy, so this state-sponsored war against truthful information is clear evidence of a radical turn toward technocratic totalitarianism. While the situation may appear hopeless, it's not yet too late to turn things around. For some encouragement, listen to Kennedy Jr.'s speech below.
Resistance is the only way forward, and one way you can resist censorship is to find ways around it. One such way is to subscribe to this newsletter, and any other newsletters you find interesting, and to share information you find valuable with your family and friends via more old-school means such as email and text message.
At the bottom of each page, you'll find an "Email Article" button that makes my articles easy to share. Also consider eliminating Facebook and all Google-based services to cut down on their data mining of your personal information, as all of it is being used against you in one way or another, whether you're aware of it or not.
