The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced its intention to collect private health records from Americans as part of a contentious initiative led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The goal of this initiative is to identify potential causes and cures for autism.
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya shared details of the plan during a recent expert panel discussion, highlighting the fragmented nature of existing health data resources.
“The idea of the platform is that the existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain. The NIH itself will often pay multiple times for the same data resource,” Bhattacharya explained.
He emphasized that even federal government data resources can be challenging to access.
However, the announcement comes in the wake of Kennedy’s controversial position on autism, which he claims is an
image source from：https://www.npr.org/2025/04/23/nx-s1-5372695/autism-nih-rfk-medical-records
