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.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States.
That’s a pretty big claim for which The New Republic cited absolutely no source. This is bullshit, I hate the Administration as much as anyone here but I’m not falling for this.
Here’s a different source for you.
The National Institutes of Health will begin collecting Americans’ private health records as part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s controversial plan to discover a cause and a cure for autism. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told a panel of experts about the plan this week.
The NIH plans to gather information from a wide range of private sources, including pharmacy chains, hospitals and wearable devices with health sensors, like smartwatches.
“The idea of the platform is that the existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain. The NIH itself will often pay multiple times for the same data resource,” Bhattacharya told the panel, according to The Guardian. “Even data resources that are within the federal government are difficult to obtain.”
The NIH did not return a request for comment.
Kennedy has made autism research a central pillar of his role as America’s official health advocate. He has made a number of conspiratorial, anti-science claims, including that childhood vaccinations could cause autism, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Earlier this month, he called autism an “epidemic” and vowed to find an “environmental toxin” responsible for the disorder by September.
“Overall autism is increasing in prevalence at an alarming rate,” Kennedy told reporters at the time. “We’re going to get back to it with an answer to the American people very, very quickly.”
He further described autism as “a preventable disease.”
[…]
Bhattacharya, the NIH director, also has a controversial background in the medical community, questioning early on the lethality of COVID-19 and being a vocal opponent to lockdown mandates.
Look! The man with an IQ of 6 wants to keep tabs on autistic people like myself who clearly have above average IQ! Though, to be fair, it’s not that hard to have an IQ higher than 60.
It’s definitely an exaggeration, but it’s kinda what it feels like sometimes.
me being trans and autistic… haha i’m in danger
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.
It doesn’t have to be a kill list, that’s what you’re not understanding. Medicalizing dissent, creating registries of potential scapegoats and vulnerable people to target or practice on, that’s the purpose. They create an outsider group to stigmatize and then broaden the definition as necessary.
You need to look at this step within the totality of the conduct of the regime so far. They are already rolling back child labour laws and openly talking about the need for a baby boom. Children are one of the most vulnerable groups in society, especially in conjunction with other factors like a migrant background or being in foster care. How many kids are in precarious situations with either absent or completely disempowered parents?
They’re already putting unattended children in front of immigration judges without legal representation, if the state simply kidnaps and disappears the children of people it’s trying to deport without due process, what’s to stop them? What do you think these ghouls might want to do with lists of kids?
What you need to recognize is that this is the sort of registry that would be directly accessible by those surveillance initiatives you mentioned. It’s not duplicated effort, it’s part of the same effort, this is just one of the ways they are trying to define their enemies and undesirables.
Tbh, there’s so much damage that’s been done, that’s being done, and that’s going to be done, I’m trying to aggressively filter anything that isn’t immediately tangible (the death of due process is immediately tangible, for example) so I don’t get totally overwhelmed. I know that there’s a strategy Bannon taught them, called “flood the zone with bullshit” that relies on producing so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt that it overwhelms and paralyzes the opposition. That’s what I’m trying to guard against.
That’s fair and I understand the impulse. The point of flooding the zone is partially to create panic and confusion, but it’s also a way to rapidly scatter a bunch of possible seeds of division or control at once, then focus on tending whatever works best, whatever has the least opposition afterwards.
There’s absolutely no situation in which a fascist regime making registries of “diseased” children is unworthy of alarm though.
I point out the vulnerability of kids because fascists always start with their easiest targets. It allows them to normalize, practice, and develop the systems they are building while also instilling fear and eroding opposition. That’s why we have to take this shit seriously from the start, the longer anyone waits the fewer there are around to fight back.
RFK advocates for people to be forced to work at farms, for the good of their health. You can expect reports of me and other minority folks to be making license plates or being used as forced sex workers.
My whole family is AuDHD. We’re potentially vulnerable here, but I don’t think that’s where RFK is headed with this. I don’t think he’s planning anything good, but I don’t think extermination is on the menu. I’m still trying to suss out the wellness camp narrative, it doesn’t sound great, but what we know is little and there’s a lot of hype about it.
On one hand, I get this
On the other hand, people have been playing this game ever since Trump was first elected and everyone keeps being shown to be right about them as they go down Hitlers playbook.
One of the groups that got rounded up were people who had things such as autism.
The people who think less of those with autism and who think it destroys people and their families are now creating a database of all autistic people
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst
Trump is already murdering people by sending them to El Salvador. He and his backers want everyone they dislike to die.
I don’t understand why everyone is upset. Aren’t registration lists like totally cool with everyone when it came to firearms? What’s the problem now? I thought they were a good thing!
