Summary

RFK Jr. is using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States.

The National Institutes of Health is helping to collect private medical records from government and commercial databases, including “prescription records from pharmacies, lab testing, and genomics records from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, private insurance claims, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers.”

Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccination, has made the study of autism one of HHS’s primary goals. He has called autism “preventable” and claimed “he can find a cure for the condition by September.”

  • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
    101·
    3 days ago

    I’m going to try and play devil’s advocate here, only because my experience in healthcare suggests to me that this is being sensationalized and there’s already enough legitimately awful shit happening without sensationalizing stuff. Now, do want you want, but if you’ll check my history, you’ll clearly see that I’m not fan of this administration. This doesn’t sound all that different in principle from NEMSIS, which is the US government’s clearing house for EMS patient care reports that it uses for research purposes. I don’t trust RFK, I think he’s going to do something monumentally stupid and just go fishing for a way to blame vaccines, but I don’t think that this is actually a kill list. Besides, what would be the point of them building a kill list?

    Between Palantir building a target list and the NSA mass surveillance program, it would be a huge duplicated effort.

    • frostysauce@lemmy.world
      31·
      3 days ago

      Furthermore, this article cites absolutely no source to the claim that this is part of an “autism registry.”

      I wouldn’t put it past RFK Jr. or this administration but I’m calling bullshit.