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.”

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[–] 197 points 2 years ago (11 children)

Holy shit, do they want to speedrun fascism?

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  • [–] 210 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Yes. They laid it out with Project 2025 and a staggering amount of people voted for it.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Pretty sure the staggering amount of people who voted for Trump have never heard of P2025 before the election, as FoxNews pretty much never spoke about it.

    Until after the election; https://www.foxnews.com/politics/heritage-president-project-2025-liberals-doge-takes-ax-bureaucracy

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    [–] 151 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 48 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] 105 points 2 years ago (45 children)

    It's Eugenics, this is them warming you up to forced sterilisation. This is Timesplitters shit, let's just kill the Billionaires. Come on.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    Well technically they're warming people up for full blown death-camps.

    It starts with tracking, then sterilization, then "work camps", and then suddenly there are hundreds of thousands stuffed into cargo trains on the way to the furnaces. With tons of them telling themselves they should have done something when they first came for...

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    [–] 91 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Well that's not great. This is the kind of shit why I haven't wanted to get diagnosed. Granted I'm already in it deep for being trans and that resulting million mile paper trail...

    Behind the Bastards has a good couple episodes about what happens when people say they can cure autism (spoilers: many children die horribly)

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  • [–] 87 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    This is fucking terrifying. How is this not a HIPAA violation?

    Edit: Fixed spelling. What can we do to protect ourselves and loved ones?!

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  • [–] 39 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Because it's called HIPAA, not HIPPA. The second P is the one that stands for privacy.

    Fifty years ago, doctors would protect their patients by accidentally losing certain files if they didn't think the authorities had a good reason for seeing them. Under HIPAA, they're required to keep and maintain good records in case the government subpoenas them.

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  • [–] 80 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    He's looking for the solution to the autistic people question

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  • [–] 47 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Next will be ADHD people... and I'm sure they all will be sent with a camp, that will help them focus... a concentration camp if you will.

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    [+] 77 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)
  • [–] 70 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    In 1936, three years after taking power, the Nazis ordered families with a mentally or physically handicapped person to send them to nearby hospitals for the best treatment. Soon after, they started receiving letters that their loved one had passed away.

    The first to notice the pattern was the clergy, who realized that the families in their congregations who had vulnerable members were ALL getting these letters, and they rightfully concluded that a euthanasia program was going on.

    Many spoke out from the pulpit, demanding an end to this atrocity, and Hitler responded, saying he was shocked at this revelation, and promising to end it. He didn't, of course, he just buried it, expanded it, and evolved it into the Holocaust.

    To Nazis, the best way to reduce the statistics of autistic people, is to reduce the numbers of autistic people, and the first step in doing that is to compile their names.

    Of course, the real issue is HOW are they going to reduce the autistic population? Considering how much MAGA openly admires the Nazis, it's not hard to make an educated guess.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    They don’t even have to kill anyone on purpose. They just have to force people to undergo experimental autism cures, which have historically killed patients. An example of this would be chelation therapy, aka using the medication used to remove heavy metals from the body under the (unconfirmed) assumption that autism is caused by heavy metals.

    If a database is good enough to connect pharmacy records, medical records, and even health info from smart watches (which a doctor or insurance company would not have access to) then it would need to link patient info together in a way that’s not as anonymous as they claim it to be. Theoretically, this could be enough information to force someone into doing these experimental treatments in order to keep their driver’s license (even if they’re otherwise high functioning enough to not be hospitalized) or force someone to be hospitalized with promises of being taught to be more independent later down the line.

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    [+] 77 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)
  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    Especially since he's already been on TV talking about how "these are people who will never pay taxes. they'll never hold a job. they'll never play baseball. they'll never write a poem. they'll never go on a date. many of them will never use a toilet unassisted." He's explicitly pushing the narrative that autistic people are useless.

    Seriously, I was thinking about getting evaluated, and this gives me the chills. I will not be seeking an evaluation at this time.

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    [–] 61 points 2 years ago (12 children)
  • [–] 47 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Get ready my fellow autists, for you are the new jews, this time in magastan instead of Germany.

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    [–] 45 points 1 year ago

    Who's laughing at self-diagnosis now??

    Anyway, fuck this place (USA)

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's not contagious you fuckstick.

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    [–] 33 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Absolutely nothing good will come from this.

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    [–] 33 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    Didn’t the Nazi’s do this too?

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    [–] 33 points 2 years ago* (7 children)

    I bet at some point soon he’s gonna suggest the creation of camps for ADHD-havers to help them concentrate better. We can call them “concentration camps”.

    Wait… wait no no NO NO N-

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago

    This is just them preparing the launchpad for further mass surveillance programs. First, they'll poke around with innocent sounding programs, testing the waters to see how much data they can sniff out of different private databases without anyone noticing. They'll claim it's for the good of autistic people. They'll enact legislation to further cement their practices of data gathering. If their proof of concept turns out to be delivering results, they'll keep going.

    Slowly they'll keep tracking all kinds of people they deem as "ill". They'll start with vilified minorities that can't fight back. Most likely trans people. Then the rest of the queer community. Of course, they'll claim there's no ill intent in gathering this data, after all, it's not like they're going to commit any vile acts.

    And slowly but surely, once the public debate around these minorities turns even more sour, you'll have them enacting all kinds of laws, and these databases will prove to be quite handy tools in aiding their goals.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    The first people Nazi germany systematically exterminated were the disabled

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    [–] 24 points 1 year ago*

    he can find a cure for the condition

    A "final solution", if you will…

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Why is it so hard for some people to believe that there is genetic variation in the human brain?

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    [–] 23 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    “Fund a cure” — a solution, as it were.

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    [–] 22 points 2 years ago

    What's crazy is that it's perfect. Getting rid of autistic people is exactly the intellectual purging that fascists want when they get into power.

    I know not every autistic person is "an intellectual" but many transgressive artists and radical leftist college professors are autistic.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Their database should track microplastics exposure, pfas exposure, lead exposure, and a whole bunch of other pollution exposure. Bet it won't, because a correlation with those is not a desirable outcome.

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