It's not contagious you fuckstick.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States.
That's a pretty big claim for which The New Republic cited absolutely no source. This is bullshit, I hate the Administration as much as anyone here but I'm not falling for this.
Here's a different source for you.
The National Institutes of Health will begin collecting Americans' private health records as part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s controversial plan to discover a cause and a cure for autism. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told a panel of experts about the plan this week.
The NIH plans to gather information from a wide range of private sources, including pharmacy chains, hospitals and wearable devices with health sensors, like smartwatches.
"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 told the panel, according to The Guardian. "Even data resources that are within the federal government are difficult to obtain."
The NIH did not return a request for comment.
Kennedy has made autism research a central pillar of his role as America's official health advocate. He has made a number of conspiratorial, anti-science claims, including that childhood vaccinations could cause autism, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Earlier this month, he called autism an "epidemic" and vowed to find an "environmental toxin" responsible for the disorder by September.
"Overall autism is increasing in prevalence at an alarming rate," Kennedy told reporters at the time. "We're going to get back to it with an answer to the American people very, very quickly."
He further described autism as "a preventable disease."
[...]
Bhattacharya, the NIH director, also has a controversial background in the medical community, questioning early on the lethality of COVID-19 and being a vocal opponent to lockdown mandates.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
I'm going to try and play devil's advocate here, only because my experience in healthcare suggests to me that this is being sensationalized and there's already enough legitimately awful shit happening without sensationalizing stuff. Now, do want you want, but if you'll check my history, you'll clearly see that I'm not fan of this administration. This doesn't sound all that different in principle from NEMSIS, which is the US government's clearing house for EMS patient care reports that it uses for research purposes. I don't trust RFK, I think he's going to do something monumentally stupid and just go fishing for a way to blame vaccines, but I don't think that this is actually a kill list. Besides, what would be the point of them building a kill list?
Between Palantir building a target list and the NSA mass surveillance program, it would be a huge duplicated effort.
It doesn't have to be a kill list, that's what you're not understanding. Medicalizing dissent, creating registries of potential scapegoats and vulnerable people to target or practice on, that's the purpose. They create an outsider group to stigmatize and then broaden the definition as necessary.
You need to look at this step within the totality of the conduct of the regime so far. They are already rolling back child labour laws and openly talking about the need for a baby boom. Children are one of the most vulnerable groups in society, especially in conjunction with other factors like a migrant background or being in foster care. How many kids are in precarious situations with either absent or completely disempowered parents?
They're already putting unattended children in front of immigration judges without legal representation, if the state simply kidnaps and disappears the children of people it's trying to deport without due process, what's to stop them? What do you think these ghouls might want to do with lists of kids?
What you need to recognize is that this is the sort of registry that would be directly accessible by those surveillance initiatives you mentioned. It's not duplicated effort, it's part of the same effort, this is just one of the ways they are trying to define their enemies and undesirables.
Tbh, there's so much damage that's been done, that's being done, and that's going to be done, I'm trying to aggressively filter anything that isn't immediately tangible (the death of due process is immediately tangible, for example) so I don't get totally overwhelmed. I know that there's a strategy Bannon taught them, called "flood the zone with bullshit" that relies on producing so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt that it overwhelms and paralyzes the opposition. That's what I'm trying to guard against.
That's fair and I understand the impulse. The point of flooding the zone is partially to create panic and confusion, but it's also a way to rapidly scatter a bunch of possible seeds of division or control at once, then focus on tending whatever works best, whatever has the least opposition afterwards.
There's absolutely no situation in which a fascist regime making registries of "diseased" children is unworthy of alarm though.
I point out the vulnerability of kids because fascists always start with their easiest targets. It allows them to normalize, practice, and develop the systems they are building while also instilling fear and eroding opposition. That's why we have to take this shit seriously from the start, the longer anyone waits the fewer there are around to fight back.
Furthermore, this article cites absolutely no source to the claim that this is part of an "autism registry."
I wouldn't put it past RFK Jr. or this administration but I'm calling bullshit.
RFK advocates for people to be forced to work at farms, for the good of their health. You can expect reports of me and other minority folks to be making license plates or being used as forced sex workers.
My whole family is AuDHD. We're potentially vulnerable here, but I don't think that's where RFK is headed with this. I don't think he's planning anything good, but I don't think extermination is on the menu. I'm still trying to suss out the wellness camp narrative, it doesn't sound great, but what we know is little and there's a lot of hype about it.
Trump is already murdering people by sending them to El Salvador. He and his backers want everyone they dislike to die.
I know. You don't have to convince me that they're evil Nazi bastards. What I'm trying to be cognizant of is the Bannon strategy of flooding the zone with bullshit.
On one hand, I get this
On the other hand, people have been playing this game ever since Trump was first elected and everyone keeps being shown to be right about them as they go down Hitlers playbook.
One of the groups that got rounded up were people who had things such as autism.
The people who think less of those with autism and who think it destroys people and their families are now creating a database of all autistic people
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst
Yeah, I agree with that. I'm just trying to keep my head in a post truth world, and I know that there's a dual incentive to spread misinformation and hype; first on the part of the administration to "flood the zone will bullshit" and paralyze the opposition; second on the part of the media to generate more clicks and get more ads and subscriptions in front of people.
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.
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.
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 otherwise force someone to get treatment.
This. This is way more worrisome than first glance.
The only result they will find is that autism diagnosis happens more often in areas where it's socially acceptable o go see a doctor for concerns about mental health. Deep red states will have "less" autism because hardly anyone will be going to the doctor and expressing concerns that they may have autism, and then they just go undiagnosed.
Why is it so hard for some people to believe that there is genetic variation in the human brain?
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.
Trauma that can give the same responses.
That's me! Early in therapy for CPTSD, we spent some time trying to determine if I'm autistic or just have autistic tendencies due to CPTSD. Turns out it was the latter.
The first people Nazi germany systematically exterminated were the disabled
So I guess it means now, that if you're still undiagnosed in the US (and suspect to be autistic), better don't let yourself diagnose... Sad times...
he can find a cure for the condition
A "final solution", if you will…
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.
Nope, microplastics made it onto the snowflake no-no naughty boo-boo list of words you can't use in government documents anymore. Wish I was making this shit up.