RFK Jr. Shocked He Doesn't Get Access To Every American's Personal Medical Record
And now he's asking for them. So he can prove vaccines cause autism.
Sometimes in life we just really want things to be true. Like, I realize that Henry I probably did not actually die from a surfeit of lampreys, but I want it to be true because, come on! “Surfeit of lampreys”? That’s incredible. Also, incredibly, not the name of any band I can find anywhere. (I call dibs.)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has things that he would like to be true as well — one thing in particular, and I bet you can guess what it is! He desperately wants it to be true that vaccines cause autism, which I’m pretty sure is even less likely than the surfeit of lampreys thing. It’s hard to blame him, when you think about it. He’s invested. There’s a world where he never started on this shit to begin with and is considered a relatively well-respected environmental lawyer married to the lady from Curb, and no one knows a thing about his terrible semen poetry, his brainworm, his tendency to work out in jeans, or his roadkill jones. But he did start on this shit and therefore is stuck having to continually search for proof that he is right, regardless of how many times he is proven wrong.
And, as such, he would like to look at your personal, private, medical records, please!
Yes. KFF Health News reports that he is specifically requesting “data from little-known state systems that allow hospitals and clinics to exchange detailed, identifiable patient information” for the purpose of finding a link between autism and vaccines. These systems, known as health information exchanges, make it so that if you go see another doctor, that doctor can get access to your prescriptions, allergies, lab results, etc. in order to avoid prescribing you something that might harm you or requiring you to get labs when you’ve already gotten them recently.
Via KFF Health News:
“We need a good health record system, and one of the things that really surprised me most when I came into office is that there is — that the systems are broken,” Kennedy said in a May interview. “We’ve had to go to the states and, luckily, we’ve got a lot of cooperation from the states, but we now have databases together that we can actually do the studies on. Those studies are in motion.”
Really? He was surprised by the fact that he didn’t have access to the private medical information of US citizens? Really?
HHS officials have reportedly met with the people who run these information exchanges for various states, explaining to them that they need this access, though they could not tell them how, exactly, they wanted to use it to “prove” that vaccines cause autism. Since most people have been vaccinated, it would not be unusual for most people with autism to also have been vaccinated. Though, curiously, one study determined that children with autism are actually less likely (84 percent) to have gotten their MMR vaccine than those without (96 percent).
The information he’s seeking would not only provide the HHS with information related to autism and vaccines, but to prescriptions they’ve taken, other things they’ve been diagnosed with, etc. etc. They could know whether or not you’ve taken birth control, psychological medications, or whether or not you have a drug problem or a chronic illness.
Last June, Behm and leaders of other state exchanges met with Kennedy’s top advisers to discuss sharing more medical data with federal agencies. The state organizations followed up with a pitch in October for a new surveillance system that would give the federal health department “real-time, 24-hour data feeds on opioid and chronic disease trends” within a year, according to a presentation reviewed by KFF Health News. Under the proposal, HHS would get data from 90% of the population’s medical records by 2028.
This sure seems like the kind of thing that paranoid right-wing conspiracy theorists would really be up in arms about. Or at least the “libertarians.” Surely, if it were a Democratic administration asking for this kind of access to people’s medical records, they’d be worried they’d use it to track anti-vaxxers in some capacity, or to do some kind of mind control/Manchurian Candidate thing, since they’re always on about that shit. But I guess since it’s the Trump administration, everything is cool.
So far, the only state that we know for a fact is going along with the request is Nebraska. After agreeing to share their residents’ personal medical information with Kennedy, the state then got the largest federal grant to their health department right afterwards — $18 million, almost twice what California and Texas received. CyncHealth, the agency that runs the state’s health information exchange, also got millions of dollars.
One former CDC official told KFF Health that, yes, this money was given to Cynchealth for agreeing to participate in Kennedy’s scheme.
Another former CDC official said that he told Kennedy there was a way to get access to the kind of information he wanted but with patients’ records de-identified — but Kennedy was not interested.
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There is a lot of bad that could come from this. Nationalizing this kind of data could feasibly lead to prosecutions of those who have been prescribed abortion medication in other states. If it’s done in “real time,” as they are hoping, women could be stopped and arrested on their way home from their appointments and prevented from taking the pills. They could even just know who has had an abortion, they could know who is on birth control and all kinds of other data on our reproductive health. Not to mention, Republicans have also recently decided that SSRIs and other psych meds are bad; there’s no telling how they might use that kind of information should they have access to it.
It is also, may I just say, motherfucking absurd to spend actual millions of dollars on something that is never, never, never going to “prove” that vaccines cause autism. That this is any kind of priority at all, given how many studies have already proven that they do not and how extremely flawed the studies that said they do were, is actually sick. Take that money and spend it on helping families with autistic children, spend it on kids who are sick, or hungry, or unhoused, spend it on anything other than fighting Don Quixote’s windmill.
I will tell you though — if I thought that there were any study on earth that could convince Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that vaccines do not cause autism, I’d be all for it (provided it didn’t violate anyone’s civil liberties). But there is no such study. There can never be any such study. There have already been over 1200 global studies, meta-analyses, etc. on the subject and they have all come to the conclusion that there is no link, but he will not believe them until they give him the results he wants. And he’s willing to violate our privacy and spend millions of our tax dollars in order to get them.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Just a reminder. Back in the 1960s, there was a McCarthy-style legislative committee in Florida that did a witch hunt of suspected homosexuals in Florida universities, the Johns Committee.
One of the tools they used, besides hiring student athletes to entrap men suspected of being gay, was using their power to get warrants for health records to identify suspected gays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Legislative_Investigation_Committee
Snorting coke off toilet seats is all about making bad life choices.