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