PolitiFact names 2025 the Year of the Lies, and this is one story of our multipart series. Read more.
Dr. Mona Amin clicked on the email.
The South Florida pediatric practice where she worked was changing its rules on whether to accept patients who refuse routine vaccines. Since 2017, Pediatric Associates disclosed to families that its physicians reserved the right to stop seeing patients who disregarded their advice.
That was now going away under political pressure, the email said.
"The state of Florida has made strong statements about our continued ability to maintain this policy, directly threatening our ability to participate in Medicaid," Amin read aloud before stopping.
"I’m sorry," she said. "I’m just so sad right now."
It was Amin’s latest disappointment over what was happening to her field; far from her first. Pediatric Associates did not respond to our questions about the policy change.
Under the strain of a government increasingly influenced and led by antivaccine advocates, health care professionals like Amin find themselves drawn into political controversy.
Since President Donald Trump took office and selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the nation’s top health official, misinformation that simmered for years before the COVID-19 pandemic now came fast. The people with the power and reach to turn the levers on public health discourse and policy were seizing the moment.
Trump and Kennedy told Americans that taking Tylenol while pregnant may cause autism, even though decades of research doesn’t support that. There’s no known single cause for autism spectrum disorder. They attacked childhood vaccines as excessive and harmful, exaggerating the number of shots children receive.
Kennedy has falsely assailed the efficacy and contents of vaccines such as the one that protects against measles, mumps and rubella from childhood. Studies show the MMR vaccine is 97% effective and its protection does not wane. Citing no data, Trump said the vaccine should be broken up into shots for each infection risk, although it’s been effectively administered since 1971 and adverse effects are rare.
In Amin’s state of Florida, health leaders are seeking to end the rules that require children to come to school vaccinated, at a time when childhood vaccination rates have already been dropping. About 88% of Florida’s kindergartners are up-to-date on vaccines today, down from about 94% in 2019 — both figures below the 95% rate typically needed to prevent infectious disease outbreaks.
Amin and other pediatricians see these falsehoods manifest in parents’ real-time decisions. About 61% of 1,000 physicians said in an August survey that their patients were influenced by misinformation, and nearly 86% said the amount of misinformation had increased in five years.
More parents are declining the vitamin K shot for their newborns. Administered hours after birth since the 1960s, the shot prevents bleeding into the brain, intestines and other internal organs. Parents’ refusal is leading to rising cases of vitamin K deficiency bleeding in infants.
Measles cases reached a 30-year high in the U.S. in 2025, with nearly 1,800 cases reported in 42 states as of November. Cases of whooping cough are also on the rise. Pediatricians we spoke with said parents of immunocompromised children are asking whether they should send their kids to school at all.
Some parents are hostile. Amin said she’s been screamed at around a dozen times.
Once, she remembers, a mother came into the practice with her toddler and a piece of paper in her hand.
As Amin walked into the room to say hello, the mother slammed the paper down on her desk. It was a document noting her refusal to vaccinate her child, a new patient.
"Before you begin, I need you to know that I'm not injecting my kids with that poison," Amin recalls the mother saying.
"Let’s talk about it," Amin said, but her efforts to keep the conversation open didn’t work. The mother took her toddler and left.
The challenge for Amin was real: How could she provide meaningful patient care while competing with large-scale medical misinformation that increasingly questioned or disregarded the validity of her expertise?
Consequences of the Trump administration’s lies about Tylenol, vaccines and autism
When Trump and Kennedy made their claims about Tylenol and autism in a Sept. 22 Oval Office press conference, Amin was with a patient. Her phone flooded with messages from colleagues and friends:
"Oh my god."
"Did you hear about this?"
"What is going on?"
The president had given Americans an unsupported medical warning: Taking Tylenol during pregnancy "can be associated with a very increased risk of autism" for children, he said.
"If you're pregnant, don't take Tylenol and don't give it to the baby after the baby is born," Trump said. He told women to "fight like hell" not to take it. Tylenol is the only over-the-counter pain reliever approved for pregnant women. Forgoing treatment can lead to uncontrolled fevers, causing maternal and fetal harm.
Amin collected her thoughts. She was glad for the focus on autism, but frustrated by the administration's headline-grabbing take about Tylenol’s active ingredient, acetaminophen.
Research so far doesn’t support Trump’s statements. Some studies have found an association between autism prevalence and use of acetaminophen during pregnancy; others have found none. None of the research has proven it causes autism, a condition first identified in 1943, more than a decade before the Food and Drug Administration approved Tylenol.
"Why can't we just explain the truth, the nuance?" Amin said. "Because the nuance isn't as spicy, right? It's much easier to say, ‘Tylenol causes this’ than to say, ‘Hey there may be a concern with Tylenol but it’s not well studied. At this point, it’s best to take it as recommended if you have pain.’"
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stood by Trump’s Tylenol comments in a statement to PolitiFact. The administration, she said, doesn’t believe that "popping more pills is always the answer for better health."
In a statement following Trump’s September press conference, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ president Dr. Steven Fleischman said any suggestions that acetaminophen use in pregnancy causes autism are "highly concerning to clinicians" and "irresponsible when considering the harmful and confusing message they send to pregnant patients, including those who may need to rely on this beneficial medicine during pregnancy."
Fleischman said the announcement isn’t backed by the full body of evidence and "dangerously simplifies the many and complex causes of neurologic challenges in children."
The moment was one of many over the course of 2025 that made pediatric medicine harder for Amin and her colleagues.
In November, when the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention edited its website to falsely assert vaccines may cause autism, Amin was on vacation and tried not to let the news affect her attention.
In December, when the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee members voted to end its decades-old universal recommendation for a hepatitis B vaccine dose at birth, she was at her daughter's school event.
"I’m constantly in different environments when these things happen," she said, "and honestly, the feelings that come with it almost every single time are just, ‘What is going on? Where is this coming from?"
In each instance, Amin made the changing guidance a topic for PedsDocTalk, the social media and podcast account she started in 2019 in an effort to improve expert online communication about child development, health and parenting.
Born after a conversation she had with a patient’s mother about fevers, PedsDocTalk today has around 2 million followers across all platforms.
Amin shares videos to help parents and caregivers navigate child development, illness and behavior — giving guidance on everything from infant milestones to identifying childhood rashes. In one recent video, she provides parents with tips on ways to raise emotionally regulated boys. In another, she talks about how to help children cope with fear.
Since Trump took office in January, her audience numbers jumped: Instagram followers alone doubled to 1.4 million — and more of the topics she tackles are related to the health confusion his administration stokes. Besides directing the CDC to falsely link routine childhood vaccines to autism, Kennedy said during an October White House Cabinet meeting that circumcision and autism are connected. Studies don’t show that. In June, he also falsely told Tucker Carlson that the hepatitis B vaccine is a "likely culprit" of autism. There is no evidence of that.
"There's a sense of authority behind the pseudoscience, because it's coming in press conferences, from official government documents. And when the government is repeating pseudoscience, it directly impacts policy," Amin said.
This isn’t what she expected her job would be.
Amin was about 15 when she decided she wanted to be a doctor. Growing up in the Los Angeles area, she drew inspiration from her own physician, a doctor of osteopathic medicine. He was funny, listened to her and gave her meaningful advice. He took the time to talk to her about her mental wellbeing as much as her physical health.
He was real with her. When she kept coming in sick with colds, for example, he called her out on how her nail-biting habit was exposing her to viruses. She quit, and the frequent colds stopped.
Amin entered medical school to become an osteopathic doctor in 2008. She started practicing pediatrics in New York in 2015 before moving to Florida in 2017 and having two children of her own.
Her plan was to stay in outpatient medicine for the rest of her life. But reality altered her outlook.
Medical lies pressure a field already under strain
Between misinformation-fueled aggression, growing patient loads and regular news alerts about the administration’s changing public health guidance, Amin found herself unusually irritable.
"Any ask was a big ask," she said, "I was just tapped out."
When she started having panic attacks on the way to work, she knew something needed to change.
Amin isn’t alone in her burnout.
Numbers show pediatric care is under strain, and people in the field say misinformation isn’t helping. With parts of the country already facing critical pediatrician shortages, families struggle to find care and can wait months for appointments in some areas, especially for subspecialty doctors.
Amin teaches residents, and fewer medical school graduates are choosing to be pediatricians. Those already in the field are also leaving traditional practices, citing increasing falsehoods and doctor distrust, among other concerns.
Like Amin, more providers are turning to social media to share their expertise on platforms increasingly populated by people peddling unregulated wellness products and unsubstantiated health advice.
Although we found no clear data documenting the rise of doctor influencers, industry groups and researchers acknowledge the phenomenon in articles exploring its benefits, drawbacks and need for quality control. Even artificial intelligence has jumped into the mix, falsely portraying doctors on social media in order to spread falsehoods and market products.
Amin eventually reduced her office hours. She spent more time online talking about the topics she was often too rushed to discuss in person. Her panic attacks stopped.
By the time she received the email from her practice announcing its vaccine policy change, Amin had already accepted a new position at a telehealth venture that she hopes will give her more flexibility and more opportunities for one-on-one patient care.
Amin is optimistic about her future, but remains disturbed by the distress doctors are facing.
"It's always going to be the good people who are tired and burnt out and can't handle this moral injury of having to fight for what they wanted to do when they went into pediatrics," she said.
"You're going to lose some of the most amazing clinicians, because they don't — they can't do it. Their mental health is suffering, and they just can't do it anymore."
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
WLRN has partnered with PolitiFact to fact-check Florida politicians. The Pulitzer Prize-winning team seeks to present the true facts, unaffected by agenda or biases.
