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.”

  • dogs0n@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    7 hours ago

    It does, to me, seem like a violation of privacy (looks like patients have no consent in whether their private data is collected).

    But, personally, I would think there would have been better, non-public ways of doing this if he really wanted to exterminate austistic people, etc.

    It being public, makes me think he wants PR, etc and wants to be the dude to cure autism.