this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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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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[–] Jumpingspiderman@lemmy.world 32 points 2 days ago (15 children)

Didn’t the Nazi’s do this too?

[–] Formfiller@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago

Yes. The first group of people exterminated by the Nazis were the disabled.

[–] andros_rex@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

The school Hans Asperger sent autistic children to:

Am Spiegelgrund was divided into a reform school and a children's ward, where sick and disabled adolescents were unwitting subjects of medical experiments and victims of nutritional and psychological abuse. Some died by lethal injection and gas poisoning; others by disease, starvation, exposure to the elements, and "accidents" relating to their conditions. The brains of up to 800 victims were preserved in jars and housed in the hospital for decades.

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[–] RedditIsDeddit@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yep, if anyone had any doubt that MAGA = NAZI... well , MAGA = FUCKING NAZIS

[–] andros_rex@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Autistic and other children with exceptionalities are already tortured (and killed) at “troubled teen facilities.”

These are almost entirely unregulated. There are no requirements that these facilities hire qualified staff, background check their staff, provide evidence based treatments. Children who are marked as mentally ill are not considered reliable narrators, so their accounts of abuse are not believed. (It’s funny - I try to report things that happened to me more than ten years ago, and it’s “too late” - but at the time they called me a liar, called it a symptom and hopped me up on Resperdal. How exactly does a teenager in one of these facilities get help?)

Turnabout Ranch, the place that Dr Phil sent kids like Bhad Baby to, allowed kids to be hurt.

There are already things in place that would facilitate an Aktion T4 style program. Southern states especially have horrendous child welfare systems, and children do die in “treatment.”

[–] Psiczar@aussie.zone 13 points 2 days ago

RFK jr, the Republican Joseph Mengele

[–] TON618@lemmy.world 76 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I'm more worried about why he's doing it, than that he's doing it to be honest, because the only realistic use case I see for this is eugenics.

[–] barneypiccolo@lemm.ee 69 points 2 days ago (1 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.

[–] werewolfborg@ttrpg.network 19 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 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.

[–] lechekaflan@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

They don’t even have to kill anyone on purpose.

They intend to starve the disabled financially as community outcasts.

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[–] lemmy_acct_id_8647@lemmy.world 22 points 2 days ago

This. This is way more worrisome than first glance.

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[–] Etterra@discuss.online 38 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's not contagious you fuckstick.

[–] burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

ah... aH... AH... AUTISM! 🤧

[–] vaccinationviablowdart@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago (3 children)

How do you discern autism from a smart watch, labs, pharmacy etc?

[–] swelter_spark@reddthat.com 1 points 21 hours ago

To me, this suggests that if you're diagnosed with autism, they'll scrutinize your lab, pharmacy & smart watch records.

[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago

It'll be suddenly revealed it's a general health tracking database, and you'll be denied healthcare coverage if you're "not doing your part", will be used to monitor women's menstrual cycle to figure out who's having "illegal abortions", you'll be fired for not waking up at 4:30AM to stroke the ego of the CEO, etc., all thanks to Palantir...

[–] deaf_fish@lemm.ee 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The trick here is they don't actually care if it's autistics or not. They just want want to create another "other" for society to Target. So you'll get them blasting this on news all over the United States of America " see this perfectly normal looking heartbeat, this is the autism heartbeat. We needed to put whoever this terrible person is in whatever terrible position we're going to put them in".

It's just like sending people to El Salvador with mom tattoos. They don't care if they're in a gang or not.

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[–] Noerknhar@feddit.org 197 points 3 days ago (6 children)

Holy shit, do they want to speedrun fascism?

[–] kobra@lemm.ee 210 points 3 days ago (5 children)

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

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[–] CircaV@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago
[–] polyploy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 151 points 3 days 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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[–] pleasegoaway@lemm.ee 24 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] sunflowercowboy@feddit.org 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Because the genetic variation is confused and muddled by foundational things they can't understand.

Simple things like family structure and the importance of it. A lot of autism overdiagnoses are purely from the developmental differences; economic class, quality of life, nutrition, exposure, and obviously parents or lack there of.

For example, simple acts like kids getting to play in the dirt exposes them to beneficial bacteria. Which I could also see laying the groundwork for gut bacteria. With how common kids do try and eat it, along with developing nations cooking with it, seems at least conceptually plausible.

I believe in autism and am not denying its existence as my fiancée has autism.

I am more saying that there is a huge upbringing differential that can cause kids to experience trauma. Trauma that can give the same responses. Social media enables this issue by pushing kids who don't have access to self identify, pushing a false representation. However, it is good for kids to be trying to put the pieces together - they just need help.

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[–] Formfiller@lemmy.world 24 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The first people Nazi germany systematically exterminated were the disabled

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[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

Well somebody is ready to follow in the footsteps of the great dr Mengele already!

And with "great" I obviously mean sick psychopath

[–] BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world 105 points 3 days ago (41 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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[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 24 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

he can find a cure for the condition

A "final solution", if you will…

[–] ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip 91 points 3 days 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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[–] collapse_already@lemmy.ml 22 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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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[–] febra@lemmy.world 28 points 3 days 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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