Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), has presented an extensive vision for gathering, sharing, and analysing health information in the US. Speaking at a Maha event, he suggested that medical and lifestyle data, ranging from doctor's visits to exercise, should be connected and made available to the government and independent researchers.
This data would then be searched by AI to explore potential links between vaccines and health outcomes, including autism and mortality. Kennedy, described as a longtime vaccine sceptic, stated, "We need to use America’s health data to determine whether the food we eat, the chemicals we encounter, the vaccines that we’re administering, the other environmental and lifestyle exposures are contributing in one way or another to the chronic disease epidemic."
Kennedy highlighted efforts to consolidate data from agencies under his oversight, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). He noted that the Trump administration is currently tracking "exposures," interventions, and claims data in Medicaid, and that Medicare provides substantial information on older Americans and individuals with disabilities.
Federal officials are reportedly using AI to process this data, with Kennedy stating, "Studies that used to take years, you can do them literally in seconds." He also mentioned that officials have established an autism registry and launched studies on factors like diet, electromagnetic fields, screen time, and vaccines in illness development.
At the CDC, officials are using the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) to compare outcomes for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, and to examine the role of aluminum adjuvants in vaccines, the timing of the hepatitis B vaccine in infancy, and various other vaccine-related studies. FDA researchers are also using the Biologics Effectiveness and Safety (Best) System and Medicare data to expand previous studies on vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, aluminum and asthma, and maternal influenza vaccines and autism spectrum disorder.