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.”

  • polyploy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    110·
    15 hours ago

    A couple things I would like to highlight for the unfamiliar, and I’ll preface this by saying that I am autistic myself.

    First, autism is not something for which there are any clear medical indicators, no blood tests or brain scans or anything of the sort are involved in diagnosis. It’s entirely subjective and observational, something that states entrust people who are ostensibly professionals to determine.

    I point this out because I want people to understand that there is absolutely nothing stopping the present administration from hiring people (or using AI) to simply diagnose undesirables with autism through whatever criteria they decide to deem fit.

    This might sound absurd, but we’re seeing people with nothing but tattoos being transformed into “criminals”, “gang members”, and “terrorists” by similar logic.

    Second, Asperger was a Nazi, and the child euthanasia program was one of the main projects which experimented with the tools and machinery of mass murder that would later be used in extermination camps. Zyklon B was tested on autistic children and other “diseased offspring” long before it was ever used in the gas chambers.

    How long do you think it will take before they are using AI to comb through the social media and medical records of teens looking for any indications of anything they don’t like, and flagging them as potentially autistic? September has been RFK’s set date since he first started talking about it, and people have been puzzling about that from the beginning. September is the start of the school year.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Second, Asperger was a Nazi, and the child euthanasia program was one of the main projects which experimented with the tools and machinery of mass murder that would later be used in extermination camps.

      Let’s not demonize him, the whole point he separated the “Asperger syndrome” from the more notable parts of the spectrum is to prevent some of those children from being killed.

    • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
      6·
      6 hours ago

      comb through the social media and medical records of teens looking for any indications of anything they don’t like, and flagging them as potentially autistic?

      anything woke must be autism

      woke mind virus etc

      Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places

      it literally doesn’t matter if this is the correct interpretation… the fact that it’s possible is the problem. it should be completely impossible

    • Zippygutterslug@lemmy.world
      33·
      14 hours ago

      Lists are not neutral; they are tools of social hierarchy and ideological enforcement.

      Creating a national database of autistic people could grow from “support services” to stigmatizing surveillance or work farms—especially if the one proposing it has a history of pseudoscientific views or conspiracy ideation, as RFK Jr. does.

      • marketsnodsbury@lemm.ee
        9·
        8 hours ago

        Work farms? No no no— these are wellness farms! Completely different! The labor will be very therapeutic! Plus, if we determine you’re taking medication for any co-occurring disorders, like ADHD or depression we’ll get you clean of that crippling addiction pronto.

        :/