SARAH ABO, HOST: It has taken 247 days, but finally, the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has secured a face-to-face meeting with US President Donald Trump. For more, we are joined by Health Minister Mark Butler in Canberra. Good morning to you, Mark. Look, it won't be for another month and anything can happen between now and then, but hooray, it's on.
MARK BUTLER, MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING, MINISTER FOR DISABILITY AND THE NDIS: I'm not quite sure what the fuss was all about. Our Prime Minister had four conversations over the phone with the President. We've had lots of engagement around trade. The Defence Minister has had lots of engagement with his colleagues and with the Vice President as well. And, sure, there's going to be a meeting. I'm pretty glad it's away from the hustle and the bustle of the UN in New York and they'll have the opportunity to sit down one-on-one and discuss issues of interest from our perspective to Australia.
ABO: That will be interesting to see, because obviously there are some policies that we don't see eye-to-eye on. We know Trump can go rogue, as we've just mentioned. You mentioned the UN there, Albo has obviously a few months to stew over this. What can we expect to be on the agenda? What will he come out with? Can we shore up AUKUS, for example?
BUTLER: I think it's pretty clear what Australia's interests are in terms of our relationship with our most significant ally. Obviously, there's a lot on the agenda in the defence and security space, particularly the AUKUS review, but there's a lot in relation to trade as well. We've secured the best tariff arrangements going with the US right now, which is, if anything, going to be of some benefit to some of our industries competing with other countries that are facing much higher tariffs than Australia. But as always with an ally as significant as America, it will be a pretty full agenda when they finally get to sit down.
ABO: Okay, so Rudd keeps his job. He's made this happen at long last.
BUTLER: Our ambassador works harder than any other ambassador that I've ever come across. We're engaged very regularly because there's lots of issues in the trade and health space that I know Kevin's working very hard on.
ABO: Alright, let's move into your portfolio now if we can, Minister. And speaking of rogue, Australia's medical watchdog has strongly rejected the US President linking pregnant women using paracetamol to babies developing autism following statements like this one he made.
DONALD TRUMP, US PRESIDENT: Don't take Tylenol. Don't take it. If you just can't, I mean, it's a- fight like hell not to take it.
ABO: Are comments like that one made by Trump reckless?
BUTLER: I was really worried when those comments first started being reported, that there would be more than 200,000 women in Australia who are pregnant right now who'd be unsure or even afraid about what to do if they got sick, particularly what to do if they got a fever. That's why I asked the TGA, our medicines regulator, to look urgently at what the Americans were putting out to see if that was any reason to review our advice.
The advice of our regulator is that Panadol, which is our equivalent of Tylenol or paracetamol, is safe for pregnant women to use, not to overuse, but to use particularly in the case of fever, because we know untreated fever can be particularly dangerous for a pregnant woman and for her foetus as well. And the TGA reaffirmed the advice that's been longstanding, that Panadol is a safe drug to take for pregnant women, particularly in the case of fever. That's the same thing that other regulators have done very quickly after the President's comments over the past couple of days, like the British regulator. And our own scientists and medical bodies here have come out very strongly. I don't want pregnant women right now to feel unsure about what to do. I don't want women who were pregnant in the past to feel unsure or even guilty about the fact that they took a treatment that was advised to them as being safe.
ABO: And I think it's important to point out there's a difference, right, between causation and correlation, which the TGA and others, as you say, have been at pains to point out. Does it stop here, though? Will there be further research going into this just to really stave off any of those concerns and any of those, I guess, questions that have been raised now?
BUTLER: This is a very heavily researched medicine. I mean, there are only two very big studies that have come out in the last year or two. A very big study out of Scandinavia that tracked more than two million children. A very big study out of Japan as well that our scientists and our regulators say pretty clearly show there's no causal link between paracetamol if it's used in accordance with instructions by pregnant women.
ABO: Trump also seemed to reject childhood vaccines, singling out the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, based on what he said was a “feeling.” Is that adequate?
BUTLER: I was really worried about that. The President was honest in saying that this was just a personal opinion of his. The American regulators did not change their advice about the MMR, the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, in any way whatsoever. This was the President expressing his own personal opinions. I can’t say strongly enough given the advice I get how important the MMR vaccine is for babies. It's a free vaccine on the childhood immunisation program for a 12-month-old and an 18-month-old. It provides really strong protection against what are potentially very serious diseases for young people. So that was probably for me the most worrying aspect of that press conference. I do not want further uncertainty about the importance of our childhood immunisation program at a time when, like the rest of the world frankly after COVID, rates of childhood immunisation are going the wrong way, not the right way.
ABO: Health Minister Mark Butler, thank you for your time this morning.