Politics
RFK Jr Calls For National Health Surveillance To Prove He Was Right All Along
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services and a man who has spent thirty years telling Americans not to trust the government's health conclusions, announced this week that he would like the government to have all of their health data.
The vision, outlined at a conference hosted by one of Kennedy's closest allies, an anti-vaccine activist who has described childhood immunization schedules as a form of chemical warfare, calls for a unified national database linking doctor visits, prescription records, exercise logs, dietary habits, and, in Kennedy's words, "any other lifestyle markers that illuminate the full picture of American wellness."
The full picture, in Kennedy's telling, will then be handed to an artificial intelligence, which will search it for connections between vaccines and health outcomes, including autism and mortality.
To be clear about the sequence of events: a man who decided vaccines cause autism in the late 1990s, before the study he relied on was retracted, its author stripped of his medical license, and its data revealed to have been fabricated, is now requesting access to the medical records of 340 million people so that a computer program can confirm his prior conclusion with better fonts.
Kennedy addressed reporters briefly after the event, describing the initiative as "the most rigorous, transparent, and data-driven approach to chronic disease in the history of this department."
The Department of Health and Human Services did not specify which chronic diseases it expected the vaccine-autism search to address, but a spokesperson indicated that the AI would be "open to wherever the data leads," which is one way to describe an algorithm built by the person who already knows where he wants it to go.
Privacy advocates noted that the proposal would constitute one of the largest expansions of federal health surveillance in American history, a distinction Kennedy has previously treated as a reason to distrust any health initiative not proposed by himself.
Several attendees at the conference said they found the plan encouraging. One woman, who identified herself as a health freedom advocate from Scottsdale, Arizona, said she was "totally on board" with Kennedy's proposal to share her family's complete medical history with the federal government, because this time the federal government is him.
Dr. Sheila Okonkwo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins who was not at the event, reviewed a summary of the proposal and said it contained several methodological assumptions that would make any findings "essentially uninterpretable by the standards of peer review." Kennedy's office did not respond to that characterization, which is itself a form of data.
The initiative is expected to cost several billion dollars, face immediate legal challenges on Fourth Amendment grounds, and produce, within eighteen months, a dataset confirming that vaccines are suspicious.
At which point, Kennedy will note that he always said so, and that this time we have the numbers.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/29/rfk-jr-collect-health-data