Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a plan Wednesday to use medical data and records from people on Medicaid and Medicare to help study autism although experts say it’s unlikely to help reveal the condition’s root causes.

The program will involve a data sharing agreement between the National Institutes of Health, the government’s health research arm, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has access to claims data from nearly 150 million Americans across the country.

  • SereneSadie@lemmy.myserv.one
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    11 hours ago

    Remember, they won’t track bird flu, covid or any actual lethal diseases.

    They will track neurodivergency and gender non-conformity.

    They are Nazis.

  • xorollo@leminal.space
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    9 hours ago

    Ahh, the autism registry they said they weren’t going to put together just two weeks ago after they announced it and then faced backlash. It’s back again already.

    https://www.npr.org/2025/04/23/nx-s1-5372695/autism-nih-rfk-medical-records

    https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/04/22/rfk-jr-registry-to-track-autism/

    Video https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=56725 Timestamps 1:55:00-2:03:00 cover Bhattacharya letting the cat out of the bag.

    • apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      At the heart of the issue, the giant prolapsed anus RFK Jr describes autism as a “preventable disease”. Contemporary medicine classifies it as a disorder. Words have meaning and have implicit intention. This is eugenics.

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        14 hours ago

        Why is everyone jumping at eugenics when RFK Jr. behaves generally and on this subject like a typical person (of the generation exactly right for that) who’s been frightened to death in the childhood by a suspicion that they may be autistic, or some event like a meltdown in unfortunate circumstances, so now has that idea that autism can be cured, because he thinks he’s been cured. Or something like that.

        Now, I’m extrapolating a very specific case of my dad (had ideas similar to RFK Jr’s on health for some purposes ; I can’t find a system in separating cases where he feared doctors as if they were spreading black death, and would pick a fortuneteller over them, and cases where he trusted any medical worker over anything I had to say), whom I know to have had such childhood trauma for certain.

        I mean, with a guy who likes spending time alone with wild animals, eats raw meat and jumps from honest climate protection activities to this, and reportedly has weird sexual habits, and also talks like RFK Jr. does, suspecting him to be autistic doesn’t seem weird in the least. And then variants connected to him being probably autistic pop up.

        I mean, this may lead to eugenics, but this may also be RFK Jr. stupidity and some trauma. I’m repeating myself, stopping.

        • LogicalFallacy@lemm.ee
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          9 hours ago

          Don’t carry water for this administration. Especially if you have relatives with autism. Like other posters have written, it doesn’t matter where this comes from, it matters where it ends, and if eugenics is even a plausible outcome you and everybody you know should be against it.

          • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            I’m compensating people carrying water for something unknown. It’s better to not argue in the directions unknown just because they are opposite to known bad.

        • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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          14 hours ago

          Just because he may be pushing eugenics for somewhat sympathetic reasons tied to his own adverse childhood experiences doesn’t make him pushing eugenics any less dangerous

        • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          Why does it matter if its RFK stupidity or outright eugenics. Both are wrong.

          Autistic people have always existed. Throughout history. Not just since we started diagnosing it. There’s no evidence that it’s preventable or even bad generally. Scientists really don’t know all the causes, and there’s no evidence that anything is preventable. Bullshit like this is what keeps people like me from getting officially diagnosed. There is no justification.

          • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            Why does it matter if its RFK stupidity or outright eugenics. Both are wrong.

            Google the word “deontology” and ask yourself why it’s most important for doctors and military commanders.

            There is no justification.

            Of course there is, people do such a huge multitude of wrong things, that such a little one having no justification would equate it to unimaginable evils, and thus normalize those evils. Don’t do that.

            Police in a European country has no justification to ignore (and even help) a daughter of another country’s president holding enslaved people in her basement and showing them to princes of that country like animals, and her little torture room, and those princes treating it as normal, and her just calling police when someone of those enslaved people dies.

            RFK Jr has all justifications possible to be stupid. Now him putting his paws on someone’s medical records may be just illegal, so maybe someone should put pressure on that point.

        • Maeve@kbin.earth
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          14 hours ago

          I think whether or not he’s willfully instituting eugenics or not isn’t the point, so much as not flinging open the gates to get from where we are to there is the point. It’s so odd how we remember this lesson from the more-distant past , but not particular lessons from the more recent past. Maybe economics and politics analyses suffers from a sort of astigmatism rather than myopia?

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      14 hours ago

      I’ve said this before, but I truly believe at some point a psychiatrist diagnosed RFK Jr with autism or some kind of spectrum disorder and we are now getting to experience his grand display of denialism.

      The guy was best friends with his flacon, was constantly called an odd kid, and has been fixated with being around, talking about, or acquiring dead animals since a very young age.

      I don’t know if he’s actually autistic or just severely traumatized, but based on his bio it wouldn’t surprise me if someone’s given him the diagnoses in the past based on his history of troubling behavior.

      • apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        We are all hypocrites to some degree, and many of us have underlying childhood traumas that lead us to do stupid selfish shit.

        That said we aren’t all trying to get a widely diagnosed disorder treated as an illness.

        Autism is managed by many things, but it cannot be cured. This is bone chilling to a large set of the population.

        • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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          12 hours ago

          Source for that? All the accounts I’ve read say that RFK was walking down a corridor after giving a speech at a podium, when he was shot several times by a guy who was angry about RFK’s support of Israel. Doesn’t sound like his son was present or the shooter had anything to do with RFK’s protection detail.

          • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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            8 hours ago

            RFK jr was at the Kennedy estate at the time of the shooting, he himself has stated it several times. Not to say that isn’t traumatic especially with what happened to JFK. The other guy is either making shit up or has been lied to and is spreading said lie.

  • Krackalot@discuss.tchncs.de
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    12 hours ago

    🎶 They’re making a list, probably not checking it twice, that’s how they decide who gets deported by ICE. My government is turning fascist!

  • iowagneiss@midwest.social
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    9 hours ago

    How the fuck are you getting a valid random sample of people with autistic diagnoses/characteristics by limiting yourself to Medicaid/Medicare recipients?

  • Bigfishbest@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    I would just fucking love it if there was discovered a correlation between autism and microplastics, or between autism and stress during pregnancy, or between autism and some food coloring or whatever. Just to see RFK shut the fuck up cause he would never challenge the owners of the country.

  • Gates9@sh.itjust.works
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    8 hours ago

    I think they should look closer into idiocy, I mean you got prime case studies right there with him and the rest of the regime.

  • Wilco@lemm.ee
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    14 hours ago

    I would suspect that RFK Jrs family had an autistic or mentally handicapped member of the family that they were embarrassed about. That they were worried the woman in question would be too promiscuous and embarrass the “totally non sexually controversial” Kennedy family name … so they had her forcibly lobotomies.

    It’s just a guess.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      Its not a secret. It was his Aunt Rosemary. The Kennedy family had her lobotomized.

      "As a child, she reportedly exhibited developmental delays. In her young adult years, Kennedy was “becoming increasingly irritable and difficult.”[1] In response to these issues, her father arranged a lobotomy on her in 1941, when she was 23 years of age. The procedure left her permanently incapacitated and rendered her unable to speak intelligibly. " source

      • cyphear@lemm.ee
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        8 hours ago

        What boiled down to was Rosemary was a woman who wouldn’t fall in line. From what I remember reading she was outspoken and didn’t want to conform to the role her family wanted. So, they started saying she was depressed and had her lobotomized and institutionalized to keep her from being in the public. It’s a very sad story.

      • Wilco@lemm.ee
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        11 hours ago

        No. Way. What a coincidence that I managed to guess that.

  • DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.works
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    13 hours ago

    The program will involve a data sharing agreement between the National Institutes of Health, the government’s health research arm, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,

    But they fired everyone at the NIH……