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.”

  • WaitThisIsntReddit@lemmy.world
    2·
    5 days ago

    I am ignorant about autism. I’m pretty sure humanity is ignorant about autism. There are people suffering degraded quality of life attributed to autism, is that not worth treating? Are people like Chrischan not ill or is that not related to autism?

    • AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      4 days ago

      I can accept that. But the problem is that autism is not a disease, it’s a different kind of brain wiring. Our brains are different, you can’t “treat” autism without changing the brain itself. In some cases, autism brings people to a state in which they can’t live in a neurotypical society without support, but you wouldn’t be able to cure them because you’d need a new brain for them.

      The solution is not “curing” or “treating” autism, the solution is making a society that has in mind also the neurodivergences, something that doesn’t happen today.

      • WaitThisIsntReddit@lemmy.world
        1·
        20 hours ago

        the problem is that autism is not a disease, it’s a different kind of brain wiring

        Intellectual disability, Schizophrenia, Depression, Bipolar. We shouldn’t be treating any of this? Part of the autism spectrum is as debilitating as those can be. As far as I can tell the only question is who gets to decide when Autism is disorderly, and it sure as fuck shouldn’t be RFK or any Trump administrator.

        • AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          9 hours ago

          At this point I’m not really sure you understand autism at all. Because you keep treating it as a disease or illness when it’s not. I might suggest you to read some books about the topic. Avoid those written by people claiming to have found a cure because they are full of bs.

          You still don’t understand that autism is a kind of brain development. If I think in a neurotypical way, I could say that you need to be cured, because, among your debilitating traits, it’s the fact that you need to use rethoric and literary figures to relay your message (and implicit meanings, forcing others to read between the lines) instead of directly saying it with a clear message.

          Tell me, can you cure a neurotypical inability to speak without implicit messages? Can you cure a neurotypical person at all so they become autistic?